No One Belongs Here More Than You
by tia8206
Summary: Post-S5. Juliet's finally escaped the island, but facing her past, present and future all at the same time is enough to give any seasoned time traveler one hell of a headache. And whatever happened to "whatever happened, happened"?
1. Halfway There

**DISCLAIMER: Sadly, I don't own LOST, its characters, or the book/song quotes from here on out. The title of this story is from "No One Belongs Here More Than You" by Miranda July, a twisted and delightful book.**

* * *

_"This pain, this dying, this is just normal. This is how life is._  
_In fact, I realize, there never was an earthquake. Life is just this way, broken, and I am crazy for dreaming of something else."_

- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

She wishes it were raining as the plane taxied down the runway, but instead, it was just sun, stupid blinding sun just like the day she poked her head out of the sub all those years ago.

Cruising altitude and she hasn't stopped clutching the armrests. She's in the middle, no one's in the aisle seat. He's scrunched up against the window trying to sleep - when was it they'd last slept? - and she unfolds her long legs and stands, looks down the long aisle for nothing, takes a blanket from the overheard and bends down to tuck it around his shoulders. The sun from the windows is falling over his dirty blond hair. He half-smiles in his sleep, showing a dimple briefly before falling into slumber again.

She's glad he's sleeping because she needs to think. She needs to think, and it's like she can't even remember how, too strung out on emotion and confusion and the stomach-churning sensation of sleep deprivation. Her eyes burn with sleeplessness.

They aren't really headed in the right direction, they'll be landing in Amsterdam, but at least they're getting the hell out of Tunisia. That's priority number one, as far as she can tell. They have one bag between them that had their paperwork and some things they'd gotten in an airport shop before the flight.

That, and the clothes on their backs. Her shoes are six years old, or several decades, she isn't really sure, and she really doesn't fucking care anymore.

Those ridiculous Dharma parkas they'd left behind. It was July and anyway, they couldn't be wearing those out in the real world. They have fake identities as it is, thanks to Richard, and she really didn't need some 75-year-old whose janitor brother had disappeared with the D.I. four decades ago stopping them on the street and flipping the fuck out.

The belly of the plane rumbles. She'd close her eyes and pray if she did that kind of thing; instead she stares at the pattern on the back of the seat in front of her, tracing the squares with her eyes over and over until the pattern blurs in front of her, a numbing pointless calm settling in, and she manages to stop shaking.

- FLASHBACK -

Richard had come to her three weeks ago. She hadn't expected him to find her at the beach; she'd stolen away for a couple of hours of much-needed quiet, staring out at the ocean, digging her toes into the sand.

He nodded at her, sitting down carefully to avoid creasing his picture-perfect slacks. She felt very aware of the splatter of mud on her left arm.

He sat next to her, close but not too close, looking out to the shore. They were still uncomfortable around each other after all these years, not friends _ exactly_, but they'd reached some sort of detente. "Juliet, I think it's time we got you some fake IDs and got you two out of here," he said.

She'd just been sitting on the beach, so still, staring out, pretending for just a second that she was sitting on the beach in Miami, taking a moment before going up to Rachel's candlelit apartment. Even when her sister was so sick, at least they'd had each other. Here, no one really had her back anymore.

And Juliet didn't know how much longer she was going to be able to keep everything in orbit around her.

Nonetheless, she kept the emotionless mask on her face although she felt her pulse in her throat. She didn't trust herself to speak. She'd never asked him to get them away from the island, never. All the times she'd begged Ben had never amounted to anything, and she was never going to beg again.

"I can show you how to get back to your time," he said quietly. "There's going to be something that happens here, it's happening soon, and you're going to need to get out the day that happens. You're not supposed to be here for it."

"Supposed to?" she burst out dryly, before she could help herself. "Because as I recall, there have been a whole _lot_ of things I wasn't supposed to do, and I did them all." She clenched her jaw, bitter, not blinking. She still didn't look at him.

If anyone could beat her in a staring-straight-ahead-not-blinking contest, though, it was Richard fucking Alpert. Once Ben disappeared, he'd silently taken charge, never mentioning Ben or Jacob. And she never asked him. Never asked him why she'd woken up in the jungle naked, either. Because she knew.

And she didn't want to know anything else.

"You want to pick your name, or should I just see what we can get?" he said.

"Leah," she said, and the name caught in her throat. She remembered how hoarse her voice had been after she'd woken on the sub.

"Good choice," he said. Leah, the sister of Rachel in the bible. "You're going to have to be careful if you see her again, you know. She can't go to the authorities."

"I know that," Juliet said, having recaptured her well-practiced monotone.

"What about a name for him?"

"You don't need to change his name. No one will be looking for him." She felt like this was the longest conversation she'd had in years.

"True. All right, well, I'll see what I can do. Driver's license, birth certificates, bank account and all that. You're going to come out in Tunisia," he warned.

"Fine. I don't care. Just do it if you're going to do it." Yeah, right. She'd believe it when she saw it.

- END FLASHBACK -

The plane shudders as it lands, and Juliet realizes she'd fallen asleep after all. The sky through the windows is dark, the terminal bathed in artificial light. She unbuckles her seatbelt. For some reason she's expecting her hands to be shaking, but they aren't. He's just starting to stir. "Where - where are we?" he mumbles.

"We're halfway there," she says in the most reassuring voice she can muster.

She bends to pick up the crayons that had fallen onto the floor, helps him unbuckle his seatbelt. "I'm hungry, Mama," he says sleepily.

"I know, buddy. We're going to go get something to eat now." She puts the crayons in her bag and takes his hand, drawing in a shaky breath.

A dozen years on that island. She has no idea what she's supposed to do now.

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**Please leave a review! This is my first fanfic, and I totally have a plan for this, I swear. Hoping people are intrigued enough for me to go on.**


	2. Amsterdam

**Thanks so much for the positive reviews so far! In response to one comment about Richard Alpert -- I actually don't think he's a bad guy at all. I think (at least in this story, anyway), that he's doing things, good OR bad, just because he NEEDS to do them. That's something that he and Juliet have in common, after all.**

**On to Ch. 2:**

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_"People are always breaking through, like in the Doors song 'Break on Through (To the Other Side._  
_But I really had. I had broken through twice now, and my feeling about the universe was that it was porous and radical and you could turn it on, you could even fuck around with the universe."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

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**Thursday, July 4, 2013**

Juliet finds a hotel room for the night, near the airport in Amsterdam. Although she's already used the shiny new debit card that Richard had supplied her, she still marvels silently as the clerk slides her card through the reader. Leah C. Tobin, exp. 06/2017.

She has money, she has an identity (sort of), and she feels a sort of sick powerfulness despite her situation.

_Sold my soul to the devil, and all I got was this Visa card._ She shakes away the image of the man in black standing over her before it consumes her.

As she signs the receipt, she watches out of the corner of her eye as Jonah stares at the flat-panel TV screens in the lobby with a sort of dazzled wonderment. She'd noticed him doing the same thing in the airport. He'd started, "Mama, what's..." but she'd cut him off before people could overhear him.

"Hey buddy, we'll talk about that later, OK?"

Now she picks up her bag -- funny how they have nothing but the bag seems so heavy at this point -- and takes his hand and finds their room. Juliet gives him a bath in the big marble tub; she feels bad doing it, he's so sleepy again he can barely keep his eyes open, but he was filthy. They've been running, one way or another, for almost two days straight now.

She gets Jonah settled in the king-sized bed -- he's wearing in a tourist T-shirt she'd bought at the airport -- and takes a shower (her first real shower in six years; she's never going to take plumbing for granted ever again) and thinks about how she should be grateful for everything, EVERYthing, that they have right now, tonight, but a cold longing settles into her chest, and when that feeling settles in, it's there for the night.

Jonah hadn't asked about the TVs again before drifting off to sleep. He's not big on talking. They have that in common for sure. She washes their clothes in the sink and hangs them to dry over the tub, feeling like she's just killing time until she can get right down to it. She is afraid, so afraid.

Finally though, out of chores, Juliet opens the bag Richard had given her. She has no idea how he'd managed to get her a complete new identity in 2013 -- from 1925, no less. Not to mention how the hell he'd acquired the futuristic-looking cell phone she now holds in her hand.

Juliet turns it over. The back was silvery, stainless steel, maybe, and had a familiar-looking Apple icon on it, above the model name and number. Hey, she'd had one of those turquoise-colored iMacs back in the day. Those were probably in landfills by now.

The truth is, she has no idea how to use the device in her hands, and even less idea of what the hell an iPhone 6 is.

------ FLASHBACK (1920) ------

She was folding diapers at the edge of their camp -- dear God, did she ever stop with those wretched fucking cloth diapers? -- when Richard appeared next to her, seemingly out of nowhere, and wordlessly handed her a bow. No arrows. Just a bow.

She just looked at him like he had two heads, tilting her own to the side.

"We need your help with something," he said quietly.

"Well, I was really looking for something more in a rifle," she said.

"Juliet, you've been living with us for over a year now. We haven't asked you for anything, have we? Now we need your help. Very much."

"What is it?"

"Do you remember the time your camp was attacked with flaming arrows?"

"Let me see, hmm, you know, I think I would remember something like that, but I --" She stopped, and a chill ran up her spine as she looked at the bow in her hands. She couldn't remember how to breathe. "That's not for 30 years."

"For you, it's tonight."

"You mean you want -- you think -- " she stammered. "Well, whatever you think I'm going to do, I'm not."

"But you will," he said, a little sadly almost.

"And _why_ will I do that, Richard?"

"Because you already did."

"How did I already try to kill myself and everyone in my camp if I'm still holding the bow in my hands?" she snapped. Hostility had always worked with Ben; Richard was like her, though, unmoved by most things, at least on the exterior.

"Are you really asking me how time works after everything you said you've been through?" Richard seemed genuinely baffled. Juliet sometimes forgot that this Richard was from the past; he wasn't the same Richard who'd recruited her in 2001. Or who would recruit her. However that worked. "You already did because you -- the past you -- already experienced it. It already happened; it's always happened."

"OK, well, _why_ are you people about to attack us? You know we're completely innocent. Nearly everyone that night died! I almost had my hand cut off after that!"

"Well, I'm sorry for that; I know that must have been terrifying. But that wasn't our people, you told me yourself." Actually, she'd forgotten she'd even told him about that night. _Shit._

"I'm not moving an inch unless you tell me why, Richard."

But she didn't need to move. Because that's when the white flash came.

She was standing on the edge of the jungle, without Richard, as people she'd never seen before -- her people, a generation out from where she was living now -- thundered past her with torches. _Fantastic._

Someone slammed a handful of long, thin cylinders into her free hand as he ran by. Arrows. _Really, fantastic._

Then her feet were pumping, almost tripping over themselves, and she told herself she was running to try to stop them, but deep down, all she wanted to see was James. As she caught up with the pack, she skidded, panting, stunned, and watched through the darkness as Neil screamed at James. And Juliet -- the other Juliet, four years younger -- tried to calm him down.  
One of the people in her pack -- not her people, except that yes, they were her people, God, this is so freaking messed up, how could this really even _get_ any more fucked up? -- muttered something in Latin that she didn't quite catch because she was still staring at James' profile, 50 feet away. She was still distracted from what was going on right next to her until the first arrow arced away from the group and hit Neil in the chest.

Neil was screaming, her people -- no, NOT her people, the Hostiles, the Others, how could she be calling them her people?! _Her_ people were the ones at the beach camp! -- were silently lighting arrows and casting them off, and _still_, all she could do was stand there frozen, as she saw James and her other self turn around and stare, open-mouthed, straight into the trees.

"RUN!" James bellowed, and she watched as they ran, hand in hand for a second before they broke contact.

And they ran. Away from her.

Amazing that she could feel so jealous of a woman currently being chased by flaming arrows.

She never said a word to the people raining down terror on the beach camp. She never launched an arrow. She just stood there with tears streaming silently down her face. She didn't know how to get back to her time, the time where her baby was probably sleeping right now. She listened as the screams faded off. Not one of the Flaming Arrow crew paid her much attention -- she wondered for a second if they could actually _see_ her, was she really real, was she really there? -- but then, stupidly, she remembered they'd handed her the arrows.  
Eventually she'd walked away and made camp by herself.

She woke up the next morning with a nosebleed, back in 1920. Richard was standing over her, looking apologetic, holding out a handkerchief to her.

Juliet went from fuzzy-headed to a hundred percent lucid and raging in no time flat. "WHY?" she screamed, bolting to her feet. "Why did you send me there? What the_ fuck kind of game IS this?!"_

Richard took several steps backward. "I'm sorry, Juliet," he said, somehow sounding a little too much like Ben all of a sudden, raising his hands in front of him, still holding the handkerchief like a little white truce flag. He continued. "We needed to see what you really thought about causality. And where your loyalties lie, exactly, after your little tete-a-tete with Jacob's brother."  
That wasn't my choice and you know it, she wants to scream in his face until blood vessels burst.

And who was "we"? Jacob had vanished, as far as she could tell.

She snatched the handkerchief from his hand, wiped the blood from her nose once, angrily, and threw it to the ground as hard as she could, which wasn't hard enough, considering it was a handkerchief. "You are not _doing_ that to me! Ever. Again."

"I'm sorry, Juliet. Like I said, it wasn't my idea."

"Where's Jonah?" she said, skipping the obvious question of _Well, then whose idea was it?_ She was too rattled after last night, the flashes, seeing James from the edge of the jungle, believing herself to be stuck 30 years away from their son, a lifetime away from James. She is angry, SO ANGRY, at herself for not trying to stop the people with the arrows.

And she's still not sure whether she could have or not, but she should have tried, instead of standing there like a lovesick teenager.

She advances on Richard. "I want to see my son!"

"He's fine. Alice is taking care of him. You can go see him right now," Richard said calmly.

She turned to go, then paused, turned back around.

"So, what _do_ think of causality?" she asked him, trying to reinstate her emotionless mask. It was nearly impossible to do right now.

"That you don't think about it at all where James is concerned."

------ END FLASHBACK ------

In the end, she decides there's really only one prominent button on the device she holds in her hand, so she presses it. The screen instantly blinks to life, displaying colorful rows of icons.

She pauses, looks across the darkened room. Jonah is still sleeping soundly. When he's awake, he looks like his father, amused and tense. When he's sleeping, though, James disappears entirely.

None of the icons look at all familiar to her, but she can tell one is a calculator, one is an address book (empty, of course -- she checks just in case Richard had been feeling especially charitable), and so on. Finally, she finds an Internet browser, and her heart seizes in her chest.

She doesn't even know what to type in first.


	3. 77

**No flashback in this one, which wasn't my original intention, but I ended up taking a break from that to focus on Juliet in the present for a bit, and what she's thinking right now. Guess this will end up being a chapter longer than my initial outline! I PROMISE there will be more flashbacks in future so you'll find out what she's been up to. And some happy stuff to come. Shocker, I know.**

* * *

_"We had once called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away before anyone could respond."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

She has too many fears about what has happened to James -- is he alive, is he safe, is he off the island, is he in another time? Is he happy? Is he with _her_? Someone else? Did he ever find his daughter? But Juliet has to know; it's been too long without answers and nearly as long since she was brave enough to ask any questions.

His name is too common for the right one to pop up right away, but she types in "James Ford" anyway just in case he's famous, or notorious, or whatever, but what she gets is "Results 1 - 10 of about 33,100,000 for james ford. (0.15 seconds)." Right. Not at all helpful. _Thanks, fancy futuristic piece of crap._

That WhitePages website, well, that was around back when she'd last used the Internet. She tries searching for him in L.A., where there are eight James Fords (and she has no guarantee even if he were off the island, and in the right time, and still using that name, or that he's even _in_ L.A. _But why don't you just shut the fuck up, Juliet?_). Four have a middle initial, and none of them match his; one's a junior, which her James wasn't. That leaves three more, but it's something. She copies the information onto a pad of hotel paper. It's already getting annoying to type on the tiny on-screen buttons. People _like_ these sorts of devices, _really_?

She sort of wishes she had a Mikhail to go to, half-a-dozen screens pulling information at any given time. _Ugh, creepy. Don't think about that anymore._

On a whim she types in "Jim LaFleur," finds one in L.A., copies it down. What if he'd gotten off the island but in the 70s, and now he's in _his_ '70s? God, she'd thought about all these things before, she'd had nothing but time to think about these things, and couldn't she just be cold and clinical about this search without her mind running into overdrive? Six years all she'd had was her thoughts; now she can actually find the facts if she'd just calm down and think for two seconds. (What if he's with Kate?)

Next she searches Albuquerque; maybe he was there with his daughter. With Cassidy. She finds two James Fords, no middle initials, and one Jim LaFleur.

She now has six phone numbers on her list. If she ever decides to be so stupid as to fall in love again, she's going to have to find someone with a less common name.

(She's hiding a hope that she refuses to think about, telling herself she wants her son to know his father.)

There's a tiny flicker of guilt inside her for not trying her sister's name first. But there's just one Rachel C. Carlson in Miami, and her sister's middle name is Catherine, and Juliet's heart is thudding in her chest. She flips over the page with all the James Fords on it, a page of doubts and fears and uncertainties, and on the clean blank white piece, she writes in a shaking hand her sister's address and phone number. _Rachel_, she writes above them, her penmanship wobbly.

It's after 10 p.m. in Amsterdam which means it's a perfectly acceptable time to call the States. But she can't do it like this, Rachel would freak, she'd worry Juliet was being held hostage, or it was a trap or a trick. Juliet can't call Rachel when she's still so far away, leaving Rachel to stew and pace and try to decide whether to call the police.

(She's hoping she can just ease on back into society with her fake name and lack of medical degree and do something mundane without her sister or anyone else kicking up too many fucking impossible questions.)

(Hey, she can dream, can't she?)

Juliet has long assumed that Richard or Ben or someone else -- maybe even Jack or James if they'd gotten off the island -- found Rachel and told her Juliet was dead.

But after typing in "Dr. Juliet Burke," what she finds is a couple of news articles from the Miami Journal chronicling her disappearance, and several versions of the same Missing poster with a photo of her from 2001 and details about her disappearance. As far as she can tell, she's still considered missing, and she feels a pulse of anger, that Richard just left Rachel hanging, with no answers at all.

She skims a Newsweek article from the fall of 2002 talking about her and how she'd seemingly been scammed by this fake company and how often did these things happen?, and should other Americans be concerned? Typical fluff piece with the moral being how to sell magazines to people in fear for their own well-being.

Until she gets a few paragraphs down and finds a quote from Rachel, typical smarmy news-article babble about how, "Please, if anyone out there knows what happened to my sister..." Except it's not typical smarmy news-article babble, it's her sister, it's about her. The pain Rachel must have felt, the sadness and loneliness that led her to name her son Julian.

She thought about how easy it was to cry the night she'd revisited the attack on her beach camp, she was crying then without even realizing it, and now she can't even cry, and why should she when she's probably going to see Rachel soon, and that's supposed to be all she ever wanted?

(Until she got greedy.)

And she can't cry in gratitude or joy or frustration or confusion or anything, because she can't remember anymore how to shed the mask. First she'd put it on as a way to protect herself against Ben; she'd kept it to protect herself with the survivors of 815; she'd kept it to be convincing enough to the members of the Dharma Initiative (at least until she'd forgotten that was all supposed to be a con, and just started living among them, comfortably, happily). And she'd kept it with the inhabitants of the '20s when she and Ben had been blasted back there.

Which still didn't make any sense to her, since she'd come from 1977, and the Ben of 1977 was just a boy, and at that point a severely injured one at that.

No, the Ben she found back there in November 1919 was the Ben she known from her first three years on the island. If she'd been well enough to think straight, she probably would have killed him. Or herself. Or maybe just both of them.

But then there was Jonah.

She stands abruptly, before she even realizes what she's doing; she just needs to make sure all the locks on the hotel room door are secure. They are. She peers through the peephole; the hallway is empty. She looks toward the windows; the drapes are closed.

She wills herself to take a breath, standing in the middle of the room, looking at nothing.

And then there's their room number; they're in room 77, and wasn't 77 the code for a Hostile invasion? She can't help but smirk a little, and feels the sudden panic dispersing.

A wave of exhaustion follows. Juliet decides they'll sleep as long as they want tomorrow, and when they get up, she'll call an airline (not Oceanic, not Ajira) and she's definitely calling because she can't stand typing on that stupid tiny handheld computer thing (she doesn't like 2013 and is trying not to realize just how uncomfortable she feels here) and if they try to give her any flight numbers with _the _numbers in them, she'll just wait for the next goddamn flight.

And after she calls the airline to book two one-way tickets to Miami, maybe then she can muster up some strength to start calling the James Fords on her list. She knows she will hang up as soon as she hears their voices.

She won't search for Jack or Kate or anyone else. She won't bother Miles or Jin and Sun in their new (old?) lives.

Not unless she has to.

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**Please leave a review! They're keeping me going and providing so much inspiration. Thank you!**


	4. The Color of Air

**Kudos to eyeon, who coined the term "Bank of Richard," which I love so much that I HAD to incorporate into this chapter!**

* * *

_"What a terrible mistake to let go of something wonderful for something real."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

The first airline she calls tries to book them on flight 442. _Not fucking likely, no thank you._

Juliet books the next flight with another airline who offers her a perfectly ordinary flight number; she packs their nearly empty bag. She and Jonah get granola bars and yogurts at the airport; she's too jumpy to eat anything more substantial and she can't talk him into eating something different than what she's getting. This international-woman-of-mystery thing is a little more complicated with a kid in tow.

But they can eat on the plane, though, maybe. They can eat in Miami.

They can eat when they get home.

_Home._

After they go through Security (was Security always this tight; why are they making everyone take off their shoes?), they duck into an airport shop and she lets Jonah pick out some books for the plane. There are more choices in English here in Amsterdam than there'd been in Tunisia, at least.

Jonah chooses a few easy books he can read to himself and Juliet picks up the first Harry Potter book, which she can read aloud to him. She smiles as she looks over at the shelf; all seven volumes of Harry Potter are there. She feels like she's skipped through time, and then remembers she actually has. A few times, even.

Jonah loves to read. It makes her so happy, especially when he's reading to himself and scrunches up his forehead, frowning.

She picks up a newspaper, too (_oh, now THIS should be amusing_) and pays for everything with the card she's begun thinking of as being from the Bank of Richard. There's about $60,000 in that Bank of Richard account, more than enough to get started in whatever new life she thinks she is pursuing, but she was going to need to figure out about a job sooner or later. If she's lucky, she will never see or hear from Richard again.

If she's really, _really_ lucky, she'll never hear from his friends again, either.

Or his enemies.

And anyway, obviously she is _totally_ sure car shop owners across the state of Florida will be jumping for joy to hire unemployed, technologically-impaired, single-mother mechanics who aren't certain how to repair anything manufactured past the 1970s.

Yep, that should go over great.

"I'm gonna read the one with the dolphins first," Jonah is telling her as they sit down at the gate.

"That's a good idea," she tells him. She thinks about her dolphins at the Hydra station and wonders if they'd all been left to die when she'd betrayed Ben, and he brought their people, and John Locke, out into the middle of nowhere.

She'd killed Danny Pickett without blinking an eye, and the Hostile who'd been about to shoot James right before she took him out with her rifle. And those D.I. workers at the Swan.

And maybe that guy on the canoe. _Shit._ And then --

OK, she has to stop thinking about this. She doesn't feel happy about killing people. But at least they were little slivers of power, grasped in desperate situations to help people (so she thought, or hoped.

But she still feels bad about her dolphins.

And just now, she'd downright refused to buy Jonah that book about polar bears, despite all his whining.

And back when Alice at the camp had started telling Jonah about Humpty-Dumpty having a great fall, Juliet had dragged him away by the elbow.

------ FLASHBACK ------

Nothing but white-hot searing pain, white light all around her, she couldn't see anything, she couldn't draw in a deep breath, broken ribs like bullets under her skin. The sound around her was the loudest thing a brain could possibly comprehend, so loud that it actually sounded silent, like nothing, like a backwards whisper.

Her mouth was full of coughed-up blood again, and she turned her head to spit it out. She wasn't sure what was going on anymore; she couldn't remember what had happened or who she was or what she'd been, only pain burning pain white heat sound so loud she could not process it and she couldn't feel her limbs except to know that they burned white shattered bones cutting flesh.

No, the sound was still there, and now it increased, if that were even possible, increased to the point of breaking her cracked skull, breaking her brain itself and oh god when is this going to end?

_You still got my back?_

Eventually she realized she couldn't hear anything anymore, and she wasn't sure whether that was because the noise was truly so loud it was beyond comprehension, or it was just gone. The light wasn't so bright anymore (how long had it been so bright? she had no concept of time) but it wasn't dark, either.

The mark on her back grew hot and tight but she was in so much pain already she couldn't, or didn't, react. Her mouth was open, slightly, her head still to the side, and she wasn't sure whether she was breathing or just remembering what it was like to breathe, back when she still could. And she wasn't sure whether her mark really hurt then, or she was remembering the sear of the branding iron burning into her flesh.

She gradually realized she couldn't see anything anymore except the color of the air, and she couldn't decide if it was white or black or what. Sometimes it looked white and sometimes it looked black and she remembered yes, the loudest loud sound ever was still ringing after all, and sometimes it sounded like voices, sometimes it was two voices yelling, sometimes it was a chorus of backwards-sounding whispers.

What was it with the whispers she'd been warned about? She didn't think she could remember. She couldn't remember her name, although she could feel under her skin that someone was screaming it, over and over, a clanging desperation, a grief deeper than oceans, calling her from somewhere far away, a remote place of a singular pain.

Then she thought maybe she was screaming, too, but she wasn't sure.

Eventually she realized the light was turning darker; the times it looked white grew shorter and farther apart. Was it turning to night, wherever she was, or was she just finally dying? Or was it something else, was something dark coming? She still wasn't sure she could actually see anything at all.

She couldn't remember what breathing felt like, other than that it felt like knives, but after a moment she realized she couldn't remember what knives were, anyway.

And she did not know how long she lay there, shaking. But that was the thing. She was shaking. First she was aware that she was shaking, but she couldn't feel it. Then she could suddenly see herself again, saw her right hand shaking. Her fingers were still clamped around the rock. "Still"? "The" rock? What rock? When had she picked up a rock?

_We were building a runway._

_What for?_

_The aliens._

But yes, now she could definitely feel herself shaking.

Twigs snapped nearby, on her left, the opposite direction from where her head was turned. She couldn't turn her head again, though, even if she wanted to. And she wasn't sure if she wanted to, anyway.

The footsteps, two sets of them, came around to her right. She could see feet, two sets of them. Her eyes were fixed; she couldn't raise them to see who was there. She couldn't even blink.

A nasal, fast, desperate voice. It sounded familiar but she didn't know from where. All she knew is that it turned her stomach. It was a voice that maybe once told her, "You're MINE."

The voice is begging, pleading with the other man, who is wearing dark clothing. There's only certain words she can make out -- "her," "anything," "please," "alive."

Was she alive? She wasn't sure. She didn't think so. She closed her eyes.

------ END FLASHBACK ------

They're on the plane and she's reading him the Harry Potter book, in the quiet soothing voice she'd perfected with the Others. Yes, supremely creepy brainwashing Other voice is also great for reading your kid stories, and quiet enough to not annoy fellow passengers.

She skips certain references, like Harry wanting to play video games (which Jonah wouldn't understand) and the parts about Harry's scar (which are too ironic for her to handle without wanting to throw up.

She'd called all the names on her list from L.A.

None were him.

She is saving the Albuquerque list for after she sees Rachel.


	5. Highway Unwinding

_"Would she understand that time had stopped while she was gone."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

She rents a car at the airport, which turns out to be more of an ordeal than she'd anticipated. The clerk asks her if she wants GPS, and she has to pretend she has any idea in hell what that is, and that she doesn't want it (or them?).

Then he asks if she needs to rent a booster seat too, and she is totally stumped. "For what?"

The clerk looks at her like she was a total idiot. "Ma'am, Florida state law requires that children between 40 and 80 pounds be properly secured in a booster seat," he drones like he's reading straight from the employee handbook.

"Oh, right, of course. Yeah, I do need to rent one, thanks."

The clerk looks at her now like she's the worst mother in the world. _Yeah, and after this, we're gonna go out for a few beers and I'm gonna let him drive._ So she smiles politely at him, and he tells her the garage attendant would install it for her, and then they're on their way.

OK, she hasn't driven in about six years, not since the last time she'd taken a spin in a Dharma van, but as she pulls out of the garage, Jonah safely (and legally) secured, her heart soars at the cloudless blue sky, the palm trees (not that there'd been any shortage of their palm trees in their lives, but still), the highways stretching out infinitely in front of them, full of possibility for the first time in only the universe knew how long.

She hits the controls on the power windows, and the wind's in their hair, her hair is blowing all over her face, and she smiles at Jonah in the rearview mirror, and he smiles back with all his tiny baby teeth, and she wishes for sunglasses, and she steps on the accelerator and turns on the radio. It's all Latin and hip-hop throughout most of the dial (not that it's a dial, it's all digital now) and then she finds a station playing an old Patty Griffin song.

_Oh heavenly day_  
_All the clouds blew away_  
_Got no trouble today with anyone_  
_The smile on your face_  
_I live only to see_  
_It's enough for me baby, it's enough for me_  
_Oh heavenly day, heavenly day, heavenly day _

* * *

She had directions from that stupid iPhone thing. The house is in the middle of a quiet block. She parks across the street, helps Jonah out, guides him across the street holding his hand a little too tight. She is still afraid of getting her hopes up, what if it's really the wrong Rachel, or it's the right Rachel but she freaks out or panics or immediately calls the police?

Juliet has already decided she'll tell Rachel at least part of the truth. The believable, logical parts.

In other words, it should be a pretty short story.

They reach the front door and Juliet feels her hand ring the bell, although as she hears the chimes, she already can't even remember deciding to reach out to it. She waits, hears footsteps approach the other side of the door. The door swings open and she looks up, confused. A tall, solid-looking man with sandy hair was at the door. She didn't recognize him.

"Hello," he says politely, the question implied.

In all the times she's imagined this moment, she'd never pictured anyone but Rachel answering the door. "I'm -- I'm sorry," she stammers. "I was looking for Rachel Carlson?"

He looks at her strangely. "Yeah, this is Rachel's house. She ran to the store. I'm -- " A half-grown boy walks into the hall, peers over the man's shoulder " -- Brian, Rachel's fiance." It's Julian. The boy, half-grown already. She'd seen him once in their lives, when he was about two, on Mikhail's fuzzy screen, but she knows him, she knows Rachel's eyes, her mouth falls open, and she quickly moves her hand to cover her face before she knows what she's doing; she slams her eyes shut even though she wants to stare; she feels like she's about to cry.

There's silence in front of her and she opens her eyes.

The man has just glanced back toward Julian and is turning again to Juliet. He squints slightly. "Oh my God."

She lowers her hand completely, realizing he must recognize her from pictures.

"You -- you're ... " His voice drops to nearly a whisper; he leans forward, his expression incredulous. "Juliet?"

She is crying now, a river undammed, in front of a man she's never met, and a boy she's always wanted to. She has to stop; she knows she must be upsetting her son. "Yeah," she manages to choke out behind her hand.

"Oh my God -- what -- where -- hang on, come inside, let me call Rachel, oh my God, are you OK?"

Julian doesn't say anything but his eyes are wide with shock. He steps back to make room for the rest of them.

"Yeah. We're OK," she manages as they step over the threshold. "This is Jonah. This is my son." She's trying as best as she can to wipe her nose discreetly. This is getting embarrassing.

"OK. Wow. Hi, Jonah." He nods behind him. "This is Julian. Julian, this is your aunt and your cousin, I guess."

The house is small, but the hall is wide and sunny. Brian brings her back to the living room, sits her on the couch and assigns Julian to bring her some tissues and a glass of water. Julian runs out of the room first. Brian walks into the kitchen and Juliet hears him dial the phone.

Her nephew approaches her, quiet, timid, awkward around her. Afraid of her. He hands her the tissues, the water, nods quickly and escapes back into the kitchen.

"Rach, hurry up when you're done because there's someone here to see you," Brian says on the phone. "Don't speed, though, it's nothing bad."

Juliet can't stop crying. Jonah sits on the floor beside her, plays with his shoelaces.

She hears Brian hang up the phone. She tries to stop crying as he walks into the room, with Julian trailing hesitantly behind. Brian manages to look sympathetic and suspicious at the same time.

"Hey, J, why don't you take Jonah out back and kick around the ball for awhile?" he says without taking his eyes from Juliet.

Juliet nudges her son toward his cousin, who shrugs and runs out the back door. Jonah follows uncertainly, pausing at the door and turning around. Juliet smiles through her tears and waves him on.

Brian sits down on the other side of the L-shaped couch and smiles awkwardly. "Are you... OK?" he asks again. "Are you in some kind of trouble?"

"I'm ... " She thinks about it. "No, I'm OK. I think I'm OK. I think I'm OK." She is saying it so it will be true.

"You know, Rachel's been trying to find you for a long time now," he says quietly, but she detects an edge in his voice.

Juliet struggles to control herself. She's reminded of her fake job interview with Richard Alpert, how she'd broken down crying in the weird lights of the projector. "I know," she says. "That company, they weren't who they said they were."

"That's what your sister said. I wondered, though..." he frowns, leaning forward.

Juliet's face twists in confusion. "What?"

Brian shakes his head. "I kind of thought that maybe you'd just decided to ditch your life."

She barks a sound that's half-laugh, half-sob, looks away quickly and then looks back. She's jumpy and scornful, and she knows it. "Do I have to explain myself to _you_ before you let me see Rachel?" she says a bit louder than she'd intended.

He's taken aback by her attitude; it's obvious by the way he straightens up and places his hands on his knees, raising the fingertips a bit. "No. No, of course not. I'm just a little -- I'm sorry, it's just -- it's a shock, after all."

"Yeah, well, you're telling me," she says bitterly.

Brian nods, doesn't said anything for a moment. He raises his eyes to peer out the back window, where the boys are kicking around a dusty red kickball. Juliet wipes her face and tries to rid it of expression as best she can. Finally he says, "Look when she comes in, I'm going to go to the door. Just wait in here. I think it would be best if she's prepared."

Juliet nods. "I think so too. I -- I know it'll be a huge shock. I -- I wanted to call first, but I didn't want her to -- to think I was in danger or anything. I just -- I didn't -- " She feels the mask slipping and she can choose to maintain it or continue speaking, and she chooses the mask.

Brian nods, lowering his eyebrows to demonstrate concern. Juliet can tell he's still trying to decide whether to believe her, and hey, he probably shouldn't, after all. She thinks about her fake name and wonders how that will go over with him. Juliet is happy that her sister's found someone, but she hadn't anticipated this little snag. Rachel would take her back gladly, with no questions asked if need be, but Brian might prove to be more difficult.

They sit in silence, both trying to half-smile politely. It's painfully awkward. Just as Juliet reaches out to take a sip of water, the front door opens, and Brian is on his feet. She puts the glass down without a sip and watches him rush into the hall.

"Hey, you!" Juliet hears Rachel say happily. "What's up?"

_What's up?_

_Amy's havin' her baby._

_What?!_

Juliet's heart thuds. "It's your sister," Brian says in a low voice.

"What -- oh my God -- what -- who's here?" Rachel is clearly panicking. Juliet hears her take a step toward the living room.

"Wait -- Rachel -- it's OK. She's alive. Your sister's alive. It's her. She's here."

Rachel makes a sound that's completely unidentifiable, somewhere between a shriek and a cry and an exclamation of joy beyond belief.

Juliet is standing as Rachel rushes into the the room, Rachel's face flushed with shock and jubilation. Juliet cocks her head to the side, smiling comically but her face is already crumbling; she's starting to cry. Again.

Rachel is screaming and crying and saying "Oh my God" over and over. The steps between them shrink before they can even process them, they're both sobbing and tripping over the coffee table, falling on the floor in a tangle of limbs and knocked-over magazines, and somewhere between the sobbing and gasping, there is laughter.

* * *

**Please leave a review. Thank you so much for reading!**


	6. Starfish

**Thank you all so much for your support and your awesome comments! Eyeon asks a great question which I will answer as a quasi (OK, not really) spoiler: "Why did they go back to the 20's because if something happened THEN wouldn't it mess with the whole 70's thing?" My answer is that it won't have an effect on the '70s, but there's a really big reason why, and you WILL find out about it eventually (probably sooner than later, actually.**

**OK, so now onto more Juliet/Rachel stuff:**

* * *

_"That day I carried the dream around like a full glass of water, moving gracefully so I would not lose any of it."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

Two minutes later, they're still laying on the hardwood floor like a couple of nuts._ Twelve years, and we just fell over the freaking coffee table._

They're laying there like they used to lay on the floor of their shared bedroom as children, lights out, playing with the flashlights on the black ceiling, limbs splayed like starfish.

Brian is making himself scare, for which Juliet is extremely fucking grateful right now.

But she realizes she's starting to get a crick in her neck, and the tears have run down the sides of her face to the backs of her earlobes, and her face feels sticky with drying salt. Rachel isn't asking her any questions yet; Juliet isn't saying anything really. It's just been a whole lot of _I've missed you so much_ and _Oh my God _and _I can't believe you're here_. But suddenly Juliet sits up, her hand flying to her mouth. How could she have not said anything yet? "Rachel."

Rachel sits up too, wipes the last of her mascara onto the back of her hand. "What?"

"Rachel," she says, half laughing. "I'm terrible. I'm -- I have a son."

"You _what_?!"

Juliet is really laughing now, her sticky face stretching as she remembers the patronizing glare of the car rental clerk._ I really am the worst mother ever. _"He's in the backyard, playing with Julian. He's five. His name's Jonah."

Rachel is already on her feet, craning her neck out the window. She is laughing again too. "Oh my God. Oh my God! Jesus, Juliet, some maternal instinct you have. That should have been the first thing you said! Oh my God, you really have a son!"

Juliet is wiping her face again; the tears are never going to stop running, are they? This is getting ridiculous now, two women acting like they've just been hit with the worst PMS mood swings imaginable. And yet she feels like she should be angry at what Rachel's just said; she's spent Jonah's entire life protecting him from things that Rachel couldn't even imagine on her worst fucking day, but she's not going to think about those things right now.

But on Rachel's worst fucking day....

They're already on the way to the door when Juliet stops and grabs Rachel's arm. "Rach," she says urgently. "Rach, are you OK? The cancer -- "

"No, Juliet, I'm fine!" Rachel laughs. "I've been totally healthy ever since you left." She gives her sister a quick hug, not noticing Juliet has frozen.

Rachel goes to the door and calls for the boys. Finally Juliet remembers how to walk and staggers to the threshold. Julian, still avoiding eye contact, dribbles the kickball the whole way. He looks at them warily. "You're _still_ crying?"

Rachel pushes lightly at the front of his shoulder. "You know who this is?"

"Yeah," Julian says, shrugging, smiling a little, his tone brusque but his eyes large. "Me and Brian recognized her from pictures."

Rachel rolls her eyes at him and kneels down to Jonah. Jonah reaches up for Juliet's hand shyly. "Hey, there," Rachel says softly.

"Hi," Jonah whispers.

"I'm your aunt Rachel. I'm really glad to meet you." Jonah doesn't say anything else. He's not used to new people; new people on the island were few and far between, after all. He looks up at Juliet.

Finally Juliet says, "This is Jonah."

Rachel twists to look up at Juliet. "Jules, you've got to tell me what happened to you."

Juliet can't bare to meet her gaze. "I'll tell you everything I can," she says to the concrete of the patio. She touches her collarbone, where her shirt is hiding the scar that runs right across the bone.

* * *

Brian has helpfully taken the boys somewhere. Rachel is puttering around the kitchen, pouring iced tea in that delightfully suburban mother way, and Juliet sits at the table, picking at her nails, realizing that letting herself be taken care of for a little while might not be such a bad thing. Rachel is waiting for her to start talking, she can tell, and she decides that it'll be easier to start before Rachel sits down. "That company, they weren't who they said they were," Juliet says, echoing what she'd told Brian earlier.

Hey, that was the truth all right.

The next part might be hard for Rachel to hear, and although Rachel's not at the table yet, Juliet squinches her eyes shut because it's going to be half a lie at best. "After we went inside, they drugged me. Spiked the orange juice, I guess."

Rachel thumps into a chair, the iced tea forgotten. "Oh God, Jules, they didn't --"

Juliet is sure she's running through the worst-case scenarios, the same way she had when she'd woken up in the watery red lights of the sub, strapped down and hoarse. She's already shaking her head. "I woke up on a submarine. The research facility, it wasn't in Portland. It was on this, well, this tropical island, I guess. I'm still not really sure where it was, now that I think about it. They did want me there for their fertility problems. The women there, they couldn't have babies."

"But -- Jonah -- "

"Well, that came later," says Juliet. Shit, how is she supposed to talk around this? When she'd had Jonah, half a century even before they'd flashed back to Dharma, there simply wasn't any fertility problem yet. She's running hopeless scenarios in her head, things Rachel will ask that she can't answer; things she's asked herself and still can't answer. That's another thing. At first she'd thought the fertility problem was caused by the island itself, but then she'd successfully delivered Amy's baby in 1977. Then she'd thought the detonation of the bomb had been the cause. But she's still not entirely sure if the bomb went off -- there was light, and noise, but was there a reset? But she still remembered, and she still had her mark. Was she somehow left out of the reset, if it had happened? Was it just a time flash? But then where did everyone else go? What if the bomb went off and they'd all died right where they were, in the '70s?

She realizes she's trailed off in speech and Rachel is looking at her, concerned. "So ... You woke up, and you were on this island," Rachel prompts her.

"They gave me my own house. They knew so much about me. There were opera CDs in the house and ... I don't know. They ... " She doesn't want to start talking about Ben or she'll seriously fucking lose it right now. "They didn't exactly tell the truth about my having a team, either. It was basically just me in the lab, and a surgeon -- Ethan. But the women kept dying. There was nothing I could do to help them." She blinks back tears, thinking about how she used to seek out quiet places to cry each time she lost another patient.

Should she risk talking about flight 815? What if they were in the news when they came back the first time? Or the second, if there was a second?

"So, after three years, a new group of people came to the island. Things started to, um, go a little haywire, and" -- she imagines adding, _There was sort of a time-traveling coup going on at the time, and I was a little too involved_, and smirks at the thought. But she leaves out any strand of potentially relevant details here; if Rachel wants more details later, she'll unearth some shred to give her -- "I met someone and fell in love."

"Jonah's father?" Rachel says, relieved there wasn't anything more sinister going on there.

Juliet nods. "Yeah. But he ... James never saw him. Something happened, some kind of explosion or ... Well, I suppose I'm still not sure." That part was true. She remembers screaming James' name over and over in the jungle, hysterical, when that fact had truly hit home. It hurt like a hand that had been cut off. His name in the back of her throat as a prayer, a curse. She realizes she's shaking, just a little bit, raises her gaze to meet her sister's. "I don't know what happened."

Rachel's face is full of sympathy.

"I was pretty badly hurt in the blast, and by the time I was well enough, whatever happened to the people I'd been with -- well, I couldn't figure it out. So I ended up living with another group of people, and I had Jonah, and then eventually one of them helped me get off the island."

That's the most realistic version she can possibly give, and Rachel's eyes are wide with shock. "Jules. You know that they kidnapped you, right? They were holding you hostage all these years! We have to -- we have to call the police." She stands.

"No!" Juliet bolts out of her chair. "No, Rachel, we are not calling the police."

"What? How can you tell me this story and not want to find the people who did this to you?!" Rachel is clearly horrified, which Juliet has anticipated, but she feels her resolve start to weaken, she's expended far too much energy today as it is. She's fucking exhausted, mentally and physically, and she's not sure how she's going to pull off this part of what's starting to feel like just another con.

She'd run for it if she could, but Jonah is out with Brian. Besides, she's never been the running type. Obviously.

"Rach, just sit down. Please don't do this right now. I need you to not do this."

Rachel stands very still in the kitchen, and Juliet can tell she's weighing her options. Juliet sits to demonstrate a sign of trust (she thinks about trying to brainwash Jack in the Hydra) and finally Rachel sits down too.

"Thank you," she says quietly, her gaze down at the table.

"Why are you still afraid of them?" Rachel's voice is a whisper, a plea. She is trying to understand, Juliet can tell. She wants to understand.

"I think I need to stop talking about this for the time being," Juliet whispers. Really, she can't handle this anymore. She thought she could, but she can't, she's far more exhausted than she'd realized. She folds her arms on the table and hides her face in the crook of her elbow and just cries. Rachel gets up to hug her.

"It's OK. It's OK," Rachel says over and over again.

_Why are you still afraid of them?_

Where is she even supposed to begin answering that question? Should she start with waking up in the jungle? With the moment she realized Ben would never let her leave? With the bag full of fake documentation from Richard? With the day that led to the scar across her collarbone?

Or with the moment she realized the mark on her back had turned black?


	7. Waiting, and Staying Very Still

**So I'm stuck at home feeling rotten with possible swine flu, and am waiting for a doctor's appt. before I get the all-clear to return to work, so this one's arrived super fast.**

* * *

_"He seemed to be waiting for me to move forward. Weren't we all."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

For the third day in a row, she awakens after noon in the darkened guest room of Rachel's house. The room is at the back of the house, and she can hear the boys splashing in the pool. She smiles to hear Jonah giggling and shrieking. Her head is aching again, it always does when they're fighting, but she realizes she can't remember her dreams for the first time in ages, and at least that's something.

She knows she needs to get up, shower, get dressed (she went and bought them clothes two days ago, and before she'd realized it, she was carrying cargo pants and T-shirts, hiking shoes, the same kind of clothes they'd have been wearing on the island in their own time, and she ditched the clothes near the checkout and started over), but Rachel has been taking charge just like Juliet had anticipated she would.

And she's just letting herself fade into the background.

She sits up and presses the heels of her palms to her aching eyes. At least there's Advil here.

She glances over at her iPhone, plugged into the wall to charge. She'd tried the Albuquerque list the first night she was here, had crumpled the paper from the hotel and thrown it into the trash when she was through. What a waste of time.

Finally she gets up, takes a shower, stands naked in the bathroom. The scar across her collarbone looks red from the heat of the water and she checks it quickly. It was only a few nights ago that she'd finally taken out the stitches. It's OK though, not reopening like she'd worried it might. Maybe eventually this one will even fade completely.

She wipes the last of the steam from the bathroom mirror now, and surveys the rest of the collateral damage. Her hair has nearly grown back after that ridiculous flapper bob a couple years back. (_That was the last time I ever let Alice talk me into anything, no matter how bored we were.) (Yeah. Uh-huh._) She looks too pale, though, despite the still-fading sunburn from those last couple days of running on the island. Her eyes look huge and fatigue-ringed despite all the sleep she's been getting now.

And it's those eyes that scare her the most. She feels like there is nothing, absolutely nothing left behind them anymore.

She gets dressed, puts on the battered FSU sweatshirt that Rachel had found in the attic yesterday. It was the only article of clothing from her old life, her first life, that was still around. She hits the lights on the bathroom and pads downstairs, outside, in bare feet. She's forgotten to look for shoes. Rachel is sitting on a lounge chair on the edge of the pool.

"Mama!" Jonah yells from the edge of the pool. "Watch me! Look what I can do!" He cannonballs into the water and pokes his head up, grinning.

She laughs and applauds, and Jonah resumes whatever game he'd been playing with Julian. She sinks down on the other lounge chair, one leg tucked underneath her. The sun is hurting her eyes. She wants to go back to bed already. Her hair is drying curly in this heat. She pulls at the loose threads on the sleeves of her sweatshirt.

"Aren't you hot in that?" Rachel says.

"Not really."

"Did you eat anything yet?"

"I'm OK."

"You really should have some cereal at least."

"I'm fine."

"We have English muffins."

"No thanks."

"How about a banana?"

"Trust me, Rachel, the last thing I am ever going to eat again is bananas, or mangos, or coconuts," she said expressionlessly. Juliet knows she should be putting on a better act if she's going to convince Rachel that she's really OK. Another pulse of pain moves through her head and she can't help but wince. She presses her hand to the right side of her forehead.

"Headache?" Rachel's looking at her, concerned.

Juliet manages a nod.

"We have Advil..."

"Already took some."

"OK, well, I think you should get out of the sun. Boys!" she calls. "C'mon, guys, time to get out of the pool."

They protest but oblige after a couple rounds of unsuccessful pleading. Rachel drags Juliet to the couch and goes into the kitchen to find something to force her to eat. Jonah is wrapped in a towel, his hair sticking up everywhere. He looks at her, concerned, and curls into her on the couch. She feels a sob catch in the back of her throat and smooths his hair down.

"How are you doing, buddy?" she asks, her hands still on his head, looking into his face for the first time in what seems like days.

Actually, it must be days.

"Fine," he says bravely, defiantly. "Brian is gonna take us back to that park with the tire swings today."

She smiles and shuts her eyes as another wave of pain threatens to overtake her. "Good."

"Mama? Does your head hurt again?"

"Yeah, buddy. It'll go away soon."

"Maybe if it does, you could come to the tire swings with us?"

She doesn't even feel like she has the energy to get off the couch right now, much less go to the park and push him on the swings. But it doesn't really matter. "Yeah. That's a good idea," she whispers.

------ FLASHBACK (1919) ------

She opened her eyes to the leafy dark-green canopy of the jungle. Twigs and fallen leaves dug into the bare skin of her back and she realized with a start that she was naked.

Across her pale skin, bruises had faded to yellowy-green; blood had dried, angry and dark red over countless cuts and scrapes. Her entire body was one consistent ache, but what she couldn't figure out was why that's _all_ it was. She couldn't remember much except for blinding pain; where did _that_ pain go? How did it translate into this, her bones feeling set and mended?

It was like she healed weeks, months in only hours. Or _was_ it only hours? How long has she been lying here? Who had been talking over her?

She sat up slowly, expecting it to hurt more, picking leaves from her tangled hair. She was not quite sure where she was or who she was, but she was also aware that her subconscious _did_ know, and she'd catch up to this information by the time she actually needed it.

Clothes, though. She needed clothes, now. She needed clothes and she wanted to get some before a lot of other people saw that she needed them, too.

She got to her feet slowly; she was expecting her head to hurt more for some reason. It felt tender somehow. She wished she had her rifle but then how did she know she had a rifle?

Something with a canoe in the rain, maybe.

Things felt a little bit too blank; all she knew was that she was on the island and the island was her home.

This area of the jungle didn't look familiar, though, and she arbitrarily chose a direction to start walking. She felt the mask on her face like a cold stone, but for once her mask was totally right; she felt nothing, she knew nothing, she was walking, just walking.

Eventually she started to see tracks on the ground, and although tracking was never her strongest skill (but then, how did she know that?), she knew just enough to be able to follow them. She walked for hours, her feet scratched and bleeding.

At dusk, she reached the edge of a clearing. A small camp there, more like a ragtag village, really, a couple of small cabins made of sawed boards, maybe half a dozen log ones, some tents made of canvas or animal skins. A few fires burning near the side of the village furthest from her. She hesitated in the bushes, she didn't want to get shot, and she was still naked, after all.

She waited, very still.

She was good at waiting, though, and she was good at being very still.

Finally, a woman came out of a cabin near the edge of the village, turned to walk down toward the fires.

She was still torn about asking for help. She was not sure who she was, or where, or when. (When?) But she didn't know what else to do. "Hello?" she called out.

The woman -- in her twenties, long gold-brown hair -- looked toward her, alarmed. She squinted before her eyes widened with knowledge. "Juliet?" she said.

"Yes," Juliet said. Juliet. Yes, that was definitely her name.

The woman nodded. "My name's Alice. We heard you might be joining us. Stay there; I'm going to get you some clothes."

OK. Her name was Juliet. She used to have a rifle. One time, at least, she was in a canoe in the rain. More came, now. She used to be a doctor. She used to be a mechanic. It was supposed to be 1977 but maybe it wasn't. She wondered how these people knew she was coming, though. She wondered why she'd woken up naked in the jungle. She wondered if she was still pregnant.

* * *

She was in Alice's cabin trying to comb out her hair when the pain washed over her head like a tidal wave of thorns, of anger light and dark. The next thing she knew, she was on the sandy floor screaming words she didn't recognize.

People rushed in, their voices urgent, and their figures blurred together until they were nothing but a giant smear on the walls of her pain.

A lantern flickered patterns on the wall of a tent. She was sprawled on a narrow, low cot, her forehead covered in a warm rag. Her body was burning hot; she kicked off the blanket. The blood vessels in her head felt like they were about to burst.

The man sitting next to her leaned over, adjusted the cloth over her head, murmured, "Shh..."

She was back to not knowing her name again. She closed her eyes. The man held her right hand, stroking the back of her it with his thumb.

The man was speaking, and she tried to pay attention in case it was important. "... won't let anyone hurt you, Juliet, you have my word."

Juliet. Was that still her name? She didn't think so. "Who are you?" she muttered, her eyes still closed.

There was a long pause. "Who am I?" the man says, alarmed. "My name is Benjamin Linus."

------END FLASHBACK ------

Juliet borrows a pair of Rachel's sunglasses and all five of them walk down to the park with the tire swings. She is a dutiful mother and aunt, pushing Jonah on the swings and letting Julian chase her through a wooden maze with a massive water gun, before he sees some of his friends and escapes. Her head throbs but this afternoon, at least, she is doing a decent job at pretending to be normal.

But after the park she takes a three-hour nap.

Her dreams this time are terrifying, and all she can tell when she wakes up gasping (she has, by now, trained herself to never, ever scream) is that the dreams were about the loudest loud sound ever, and the darkest dark thing, and the brightest bright thing, and being at the bottom of a deep fucking hole, and a knife slashing across her skin.

And emptying a gun into the person lying at her feet, and feeling no remorse whatsoever.

* * *

**If you're enjoying this or have questions/comments, PLEASE leave a review! They encourage me sooo much and inspire me to keep going at this crazy pace. **

**OK, a whole buncha comments from me: So, I don't know if this is clear or not, but Juliet definitely has a bit of PTSD. Our dear Losties have probably had about a hundred traumatic experiences each, so it seemed realistic. But the headaches? Definitely NOT psychosomatic.**

**Chapter 8 is actually already mostly written. I'd originally intended it to be Chapter 6, and I wrote it before I'd even written Chapter 4, but then I thought about pacing so I've purposely (and meanly) held it back. It should be worth the wait, though. And there won't be any huge cliffhanger for once. At least, I don't think so.**

**And yeah, I totally wrote in my own fever and headaches. I have a laptop so I wrote this on the couch, but I'm gonna go collapse now.**


	8. Not LAX

_"Are you angry? Punch a pillow. Was it satisfying? Not hardly. These days people are too angry for punching._

_What you might try is stabbing. Take an old pillow and lay it on the front lawn. Stab it with a big pointy knife. Again and again and again. Stab hard enough for the point of the knife to go into the ground._

_Stab until the pillow is gone and you are just stabbing the earth again and again, as if you want to kill it for continuing to spin, as if you are getting revenge for having to live on this planet day after day, alone."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

**Saturday, July 6, 2013 **

Goddamn, but women are all the same, weren't they? James leaves her on the back deck, chattering away on the phone as she leans against the railing. He pauses before he ducks through the door, and she shakes out her sandy brown hair and laughs at something the person on the phone had just said. Women, they just loved to hear the sound of their own voices. Could talk for an hour about any damn thing.

_Except for Jules,_ a nagging voice in the back of his head said. She only spoke when she had something real to say.

Not this again. He is always spurred into activity when this starts up in his head.

He grabs a beer from the fridge, slams the door, thinks again and pulls out the pitcher of iced tea for her. Pours her a glass, fills it with ice, leaves it like a peace offering on the railing outside. She smiles her thanks quickly before turning back to her conversation.

James wants to be outside too, the weather is perfect, with none of that bullshit tropical humidity he dealt with for three years, but he's had it with her always on the damn phone. He takes the long way around to the front, looks at his battered old Jeep. Not one of those electric-blue Dharma Jeeps -- goddamn the electric blue of her eyes as she dangled over oblivion -- but that sorta color would look mighty odd around here in this day and age. Couldn't help but get this old olive-green Jeep, though, and there was no way he was going to be driving around one of those old hippie vans like some Woodstock stoner reject who can't get over the '60s (or '70s, as the case may be).

And anyway, the damn Jeep is dirty again, should figure it would be what with the roads up here, and so what? It'll be a wholesome, constructive use of this angry energy that's starting up in him again. He doesn't want her to see him this way, he always hides these moods behind chores or jokes.

Forcing up the garage door, James finds a bucket, some rags, a bottle of cleanser. He turns on the hose and waits as the bucket fills. He thinks of Juliet, annoyed, trying to wash her greasy fingerprints off a Dharma Jeep, her navy blue jumpsuit splattered with droplets. "Missed a spot," he told her, and she'd smirked and sprayed him with the hose.

He can't even wash his Jeep without thinking about her.

------ FLASHBACK (1977-2007) ------

He would have crawled right into that goddamn fucking hole if Kate hadn't started screaming for Jackass over there. They managed to pull him away, not too difficult considering he couldn't even stand up straight.

_I got you. Don't you leave me!_

_It's OK._

_DON'T you leave me! You hold on._

_I love you._

_No you don't let go._

_I love you, James. I love you so much._

Why couldn't he have told her he loved her back. That's the one thing he couldn't get out of his head as the scaffolding collapsed; he was doubled over across them and they pulled him away (he could still feel the cool dark green pole that he dropped his face onto the moment after she left go), his feet barely touching the ground. He couldn't hear anything except himself and the hum of something electrical. He had no idea where they were supposed to be running to if they were all just gonna get sucked into some damn hole anyway, which was really what he wanted -- when it all was gone in a flash of white, and James woke up in a strange bed in a strange room. Dark green sheets, old wood plank floor.

_This sure don't look like LAX._

He got out of bed.

For lack of anything more logical to do, he looked in the mirror, not sure if he'd look three years younger or thirty years older or what, but what he saw was exactly what he saw last time he looked, and his face was still bruised from where St. Jack tried to get the best of him.

_What the fuck?_

Juliet. He dropped to the ground of the unfamiliar room and sobbed.

When he could finally get up, he looked out the window at dark green deciduous trees. It was probably late summer, somewhere not tropical. He was on the second floor, wherever he was.

He searched the room for any clues as to where he was, when he was. Finally he saw a laptop in the corner, flipped it open.

August 16, 2007, eight in the morning.

_What the fuck?_

A cell phone on the floor started to buzz. He picked it up, saw the name on the display and hurled it across the room. He didn't watch it land but he heard the crunch of plastic. _Good. Show her not to call me again._

A new set of memories -- a second set of memories, three years' worth -- started to fill in the blanks. This was his house, he rented it. That was _his_ Jeep parked out front. That was his _own_ phone he just broke.

_Please be alive,_ he whispered in his head, and typed "Dr. Juliet Burke" into Google. He found articles about her mysterious disappearance in 2001; several versions of a Missing poster with an old photo of her, a little younger, more timid-looking than when he'd known her; a Newsweek article from the fall of 2002. He tried "Juliet Carlson" and got close to zip. He tried "Oceanic flight 815" and found nothing except a link to Oceanic's Web site and the regular Sydney/L.A. flight that leaves that time every day.

He could not remember how to breathe. He closed his eyes and focused on her face.

The reset worked? But Juliet still went to the island. Was she alive again? And what if she'd already been trapped there an extra three years because for two seconds he'd looked at Kate. And what if she was still dead and none of it had been for anything.

Slowly he realized the noise in the room was coming from him; he was screaming at the top of his lungs, not words, just grief as loud as he could make it. He wrenched the laptop out of its power cords and hurled it at the window. Stupid fucking modern triple-pane window was too strong and the damn thing just bounced off like nothing. He grabbed the laptop and started slamming it into the wall, yelling with each strike, over and over watching the sheetrock crumble and the plastic casing of the laptop split. "COME ON, YOU SONUVABITCH!" He slammed it until the damn thing fell apart in his hands and he dropped it to the ground and kicked the fucking thing until it sparked and shocked him.

He could not breathe, he seriously could not fucking breathe, and he didn't know what to do. But he knew he had to get back to the island. He had to know. If getting back there killed him, then so be it.

At least Phil got what was coming to him.

And St. Jack, knocked out by a fucking toolbox. How appropriate.

------ END FLASHBACK ------

The hose trembles in his hands. Why in hell had he gotten a freakin' Jeep? He should have bought a Volvo station wagon or something, he thinks, as he walks around the side of the house.  
"Hey, Chatty Cathy," he calls. "Wanna help dear ol' Dad wash the Jeep?"

Clementine looks up and rolls her eyes. "Hey Maddie, I gotta go. My dad is making me go wash the car with him."

She hangs up, looks at him, lips pursed.

"Oh come on, I know you were dyin' to get off that call," he says gruffly. "Maddie ain't had nothin' interesting to say since she broke it off with that Matt kid." Clem grins. They walk around to the driveway.

His daughter may drive him crazy sometimes. But she helps him to not feel so alone.


	9. Because We Don't

_"I don't believe in psychology, which says that everything you do is because of yourself. That is so untrue. We are social animals, and everything we do is because of other people, because we love them, or because we don't."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

She wakes up to a jangling alarm clock on the fourth morning at Rachel's with yesterday's headache only an improbable memory. She stares at the ceiling for a moment before remembering the noise belongs to the alarm clock on the side table, and she reaches over to turn it off. It is 8:15 a.m., Wednesday, July 10, 2013. She is forcing herself today to rejoin the rest of the world.

The floor is cool on her bare feet; it helps to wake her up.

She stands in the middle of the room, stretches. The guest room was clearly an afterthought, cream walls, pale green duvet. It's blank, but that suits her right now.

She goes downstairs. Rachel is surprised to see her up, but doesn't make a big deal out of it. They make breakfast together, and Juliet even eats some. She pays extra attention to Jonah's stories, looks him in the eye, asks Julian questions and laughs at his jokes. She can do this. Happy family. She _can_.

Fake it 'til you make it, and being happy can be a con, too. Until it's not anymore.

"I think I should figure out about finding an apartment today," she tells Rachel once the boys are in the pool. Pools are a great trick for tiring out kids; she'll have to find a place with a pool.

"What? No! You just got here! I don't mind having you stay here awhile," Rachel says.

"Rach... You know as long as I stay here I'm going to let you take care of me."

"Well, what's wrong with that? You took care of me when I was sick."

"Yeah, but... I'm not sick. I just need an extra push right now. So just pretend you're kicking me out."

"Well, would it still be considered kicking you out if I help you find a place?"

"Nope."

"OK, good."

------ FLASHBACK (1919-1920) ------

After her fever broke, she helped where she could and kept her mouth shut otherwise. She remembered everything from her first three years on the island, and a few thin shreds from the next three. But she still didn't know how she'd gotten here, or why, exactly, she was pregnant -- she thought she still was, anyway.

She felt so nauseated those days, unless that was just a result of her proximity to Ben.

But it was still easier to act like she didn't remember a thing, and thanks to her grade-A poker face, Ben seemed to buy it hook, line and sinker.

Miraculously, he seemed to leave her alone a good deal, which helped to avoid attracting suspicion from the rest of the camp's inhabitants. (Juliet kept wanting to think of them as the Others, except there were no other people the Others could be "other" to, just yet.) She wasn't sure what Ben was doing, exactly, but he disappeared for hours or even days at a time and looked extremely keyed-up whenever he returned.

She played up her memory loss a bit to figure out the year and how things exactly were done around there, until one day a couple months in, when a man named Nicholas cut his arm on something and Ben told her she used to be a nurse, did she remember what to do?

Juliet pretended to be confused. "I think... I think I do." She didn't like the way his eyes were boring into her; he still was falling for this con, wasn't he?

Ben smiled crisply. "Good! I'll get you what you need." He turned and left.

Juliet watched him go, then turned to look at Nicholas. "Mind if I take a look?" she asked him.

He nodded, extending his forearm. "You sure you remember what you're doing?"

She took his arm in her hand. "Some things you just don't forget." _Other things, I guess you do._

Nicholas smiled at her and she liked his hazel eyes, smiled back. The breeze felt good on her face, made her not feel so queasy. It was a good day, all things considered.

* * *

Another day she was carrying a load of firewood to the cooking area when Alice ran up behind her. "What are you doing?! Give me that!" She pulled three-quarters of the load out of Juliet's arms.

Juliet stared at her. "What am I doing? What are you doing?" She reached for the firewood.

"Do you really think you should be carrying that around in your condition?"

Juliet paused, her hand hovering over her midsection. "Does it show that much?"

"Not really, but you can't keep your hands off your stomach. Plus that constant shade of green? It doesn't really suit you."

"Does anyone else know?"

"I haven't heard anyone else mention it, so..." Alice shrugged and grinned. "It's just that I'm extremely smart."

"Could you not say anything for now? I'd rather this didn't become island gossip just yet."

Alice finished stacking the wood. "No, of course not. What about ... What about your husband?"

Juliet was pretty sure there wasn't a husband, not a real one anyway, just maybe some made-up, make-believe, playing-house version from a time where morals were of an entirely different realm. She remembered those first three years so precisely, Ben and Goodwin and the sub and Rachel on the monitor and Adam bitching about Stephen King in their book club.

And she _knew_ there were three years more after that, during which she was a mechanic in a different time, but those years were the color of wheat and she couldn't see through the haze.

She fixed her eyes on Alice's, answered truthfully. "I don't know. I can't remember. I think -- wherever I came from, I think I left him behind."

* * *

The next day Nicholas found her heaving into some bushes.

"You all right?" he asked her, concerned.

_I'd be great if you could let me puke in private,_ she thought. She started to respond but turned away to be sick again. When she was finally done, squeezing her eyes shut in humiliation, waiting for him to leave, he handed her his canteen and a handkerchief. "Here."

She wiped her mouth and took a couple of small sips of water, tried to breathe deeply. "Thanks."

"You know... If you ever want to talk about anything, I'm a pretty good listener," he said.

"Thank you," she said. "But I'm not much of a talker."

* * *

She was having a minor meltdown in her tent. Nothing fit anymore. She'd been here more than three months already, so she was into her second trimester, and nothing fucking fit. And it wasn't like there was a mall on the other side of the jungle with a maternity store. At least in 2004 she could have raided Claire's cast-off clothing supply. There was a huge black tank top in there for sure. _(Oh yeah, a plane crashed on the island, too...)_

She tried to send Alice mental signals to come to her tent and help her, but since she didn't _have_ super-powers, just got fucked over occasionally by others who did, she flopped down onto her cot and groaned.

Dresses were mainly what they got here, considering the time, and those were much easier to fit into, anyway, right now. They did get shipments sometimes from ... somewhere. She still wasn't exactly sure who'd funded their Happy Little Kingdom of Ben and Jacob during her first three years, but for all she knew, it was the same people.

Eventually, though, Alice did read her brain waves, or more accurately, wondered where Juliet was, and Alice stopped by her tent. When she _finally_ stopped laughing at Juliet's grumpiness (which took a little longer than Juliet would have liked, frankly), she went searching for clothes and found a few handouts.

Juliet slipped one of the dresses over her head -- at least empire waists were in style right now, and they were perfect for this sort of thing. But she looked down at her middle. _Son of a bitch. (Oh. Maybe I shouldn't use that expression anymore, considering.)_

"OK, so _this_" -- she pointed at her belly -- "is really, really obvious."

Alice laughed. "Yes, it is!"

Juliet did the best version of dagger eyes she could at the moment, even though it was hard when Alice was so cheerful all the damn time. "I'm supposed to walk AROUND like this?"

"Are you planning on hiding in HERE for the next however many months?"

"Well, considering the way you're laughing, yes, probably."

"Oh, come on, you look fine. I don't know what you're so worried about. People have to find out sooner or later."

Juliet remembered Nicholas's kind gaze when she was sick. She assumed he knew already, wondered if anyone else did. "I know," she said hesitantly. She looked down again, weighing her options (or lack of options). She'd been able to hide it fairly well until now, but the new style really did emphasize her middle a lot more. And she was scared about Ben. Her baby's father was a big piece of her missing memory, one of the things she truly didn't have to pretend not remembering, and she was worried it would be something Ben could dangle over her head.

Finally, ignoring Juliet's protests, Alice dragged her out of the tent by her wrist, and they walked toward the edge of the camp to get something for breakfast. Ben was standing near one of the communal tables, drinking something out of a tin cup. He hadn't been there the past couple of weeks. Without meaning to, Juliet met his gaze. The look in his eyes could have cut glass.

He took another sip and raised his hand in greeting, standing very still.

Juliet kept walking with Alice, but for some reason she couldn't help turning her head back as they passed him. And that was the last time she saw him for nearly six years.

------ END FLASHBACK -------

Rachel sits on the floor of the living room as Juliet goes through rental listings. They make fun of the hideous ones together, mocking maroon '70s kitchens and puke-colored tiles until the tears are streaming down their faces. It feels, for a few minutes at least, like nothing's changed.

Juliet has a pad of white paper next to the computer covered in phone numbers (she is trying not to think of the pad of Amsterdam hotel paper, the pages crumpled and trashed) and she's finally thinking she's made a good enough start on apartments to feel satisfied about their efforts this morning.

Rachel throws a Nerf ball at the back of Juliet's head. Juliet stays very still as it bounces off, her eyes fixated on something in the corner. Rachel waits for the ball to roll back across the floor, then picks it up and throws it at the back of Juliet's head again.

That's all the provocation she needs.

Juliet rolls off the desk chair, sending it spinning across the room as a perfect distraction, and dives for Julian's SuperSoaker. She grabs it, immediately and effortlessly tumbling in a crouch in the corner, spraying her sister with water before Rachel has a chance to blink. Rachel falls onto her back, laughing and screeching hysterically.

Juliet ends her assault by pretending to blow smoke off the barrel of the water gun.

"Damn, girl," Rachel groans as she shakes water off her face. "When did you get to be such a crack shot?"

Juliet laughs until her ribs ache.

* * *

**Love it? Hate it? Want to read about James walking around shirtless? Click the Review button!**  
**And an especially big Island thanks to Aurora1020, Maria's Lost, eyeon, Jaqs, KaydenceRei, kab16 and Mad Steph for all your reviews and comments and questions!**


	10. Missed

_"Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person's face as you pass on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. There are as much for you as they are for other people._

_Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

She's sitting on the edge of the bath, shampooing his hair that night when he asks the first of three impossible questions he will ask this week. The water is bubbly and the little white plastic boats she'd found in Rachel's spare closet were bobbing in the water.

He twists up to look at her and she instinctively moves her hand over his forehead to protect his eyes. "Watch out or you'll get soap in your eyes, buddy."

He kept looking at her with those eyes so like her own it unnerved her at times. "When are we going home?"

The question floored her. Here they were in a comfortable house surrounded by family, he was taking a bubble bath with plastic boats and they'd eaten a dinner that had been cooked indoors. "Home?"

"Yeah. Are we going soon because Christopher -- "

She cut him off. "No, buddy. We're not going back there anymore. This is our home now."

She can see the confusion over his face, the concept that home could be something that ever changed. "We're staying here?"

"Mm-hmm. Well, soon I think we're going to find our own place to live, just you and me, but we'll be right near Julian and Rachel and Brian, OK?" She is amazed that the island could ever have felt like a real home to him instead of a prison, a trap. But then, it was all he'd known. Maybe sometimes it had even been fun.

Jonah's mouth is moving silently over half-formed words like his brain is trying to choose which to send out. He is past five and a half, and sometimes she forgets he's not the quiet sleeping baby in the sling over her shoulder anymore. She feels guilty they've been here nearly a week and she hadn't even thought to explain this to him.

"Did you know that before the island, I used to live here? Remember how I told you about your aunt Rachel and me when we were kids like you and Julian? That was here, buddy. That wasn't on the island."

"And you were sisters and one time she tripped you down the stairs," Jonah says, and grins.

"Yeah, but that really hurt, don't ever try that with anyone," she says, trying not to laugh.

"Sometimes bad stuff happened on the island."

"I know. Sometimes really, really bad stuff happened. I'm sorry that it did."

"Does bad stuff happen here too?"

She thinks about her fake name and wonders if anyone will ever come for her, and if the fake name will really make a bit of difference in keeping them safe anyway, or if she just kissed away her medical degree for no reason. But then she thinks about her headaches, the dreams, her black mark, Richard the day she'd finally laid some of her cards on the table. She wants to tell Jonah nothing bad will ever happen again. "Not -- not like on the island," is all she can manage. "I'm sorry we didn't talk about this before."

He's poking at the biggest toy boat now, pushing it under the water and watching it pop up, his attention span waning. "S'OK."

"Do you have any more questions?" she asks, trying to get him to look at her again, picking up a pitcher to rinse his hair.

He thinks. "Do you miss it?"

"Do I miss what? The island?" He nods.

"Put your head down, let me rinse your hair... " She thinks. Does she miss it? Does she miss practically living in Wellington boots during rainy season? Does she miss having a rifle slapped into her hands whenever they wanted to go on a boar hunt, once they discovered she was a crack shot? Does she miss not having her sister, a phone, access to decent Pad Thai, a washer and dryer, electricity? "I miss the coffee," she says comically, trying to turn this into a joke. "They had really good, strong coffee. Kept me awake for days and days and days!"

Jonah giggles. "Could we get a cat?"

This surprises her. "A cat? Really?"

"Yeah. The people who live in the next house? They have a cat that's black and white, and sometimes it comes into the yard here? And it lets me pet it."

"Oh." She considers this. "Maybe once we have our own place to live." She pauses, reaches for a big striped towel. "You know you can ask me questions any time, right?"

"Yes. Can we read two chapters tonight?"

"Yeah, buddy. We can do that."

It's been a long day of being back in the real world. By the time he drops off to sleep in Julian's room, she's ready to do the same. She calls downstairs to say goodnight, shuffles into the guest room (ignoring the sadness settling over her again, _it doesn't matter, it's nothing_) and barely bothers to kick off her shoes before falling into bed.

She's at the bottom of an incredibly deep and dreamless sleep when she feels warm breath brush across her face. She snaps awake with a high-pitched gasp and the unmistakable sensation that until a split-second earlier, a face had been hovering exactly over hers.

The room is pitch-black. Her heart pounding, she shoots her arms directly into the air to grasp nothing, then finds herself hurtling sideways, painfully jamming her shoulder into the end table, reaching for the lamp only to send it skittering halfway across the table. She slams both palms onto the lamp and snaps on the light, finally, to find exactly what she is expecting.

Nothing.

The chain pull on the lamp clinks rhythmically against the base.

Her heart thuds in her chest. Her breathing is ragged. She wants to touch the raised lines of her back but she doesn't.

She doesn't sleep again until the sky starts to turn pink.

------ FLASHBACK (1920) ------

Her eyes opened slowly. She was curled on her side on the cot in her tent, two wool blankets hooked over her left shoulder, the one that loved to get dislocated.

Something was different.

Maybe it just felt strange that this was one of her last mornings in her tent. They were in the process of building her a cabin to stay in, since, as they'd put it, "her people" didn't seem to be coming for her. She'd wanted to tell them that _they_ were her people, but then that didn't quite seem right anyway.

Something was different, though, different then, right that moment, and she couldn't figure out what it was. First she thought that maybe she just felt strange because it was so windy out and branches were slapping, hard, against the walls of her tent. That wasn't it, though.

She wasn't awake enough yet. She pushed her shoulder blades together, moved her legs, brushed her cupped hand over the swell of her belly.

That was it.

She instantly stilled. There is was again. A tiny swoosh, down toward the right, below her navel. Swoosh. Swoosh.

A smile stretched hard over her face. She didn't know the last time she felt a smile so huge, so involuntary. She pressed her other hand over her smile, closed her eyes. Swoosh.

Her eyes still closed, she began to giggle. It tickled. How strange. She laughed, she was laughing so hard, it filled up her very soul. She pulled her hand from her mouth, "James -- "

Slowly, she opened her eyes. She sat up, starting at the inside of her tent. Her smile hardened millimeter by millimeter, then fell from her face. She couldn't get enough air, she was gasping and gasping and she could not fill her lungs fast enough. She remembered. She remembered everything.

_New Year's Eve 1974 with nonstop Geronimo Jackson and James kissing her in a corner after they'd both had too much to drink for that very purpose, hearing Miles walk past them muttering, "Fuckin' finally," at which point they both managed to flip Miles off without pulling away from each other._

_The first time he'd drunk her coffee and it was so strong he'd faked a very unrealistic heart attack that concluded with him falling onto the floor and taking her down with him._

_The weird smell of the moldy carpets in the Dharmaville rec room._

_The day she'd first seen Ben as a child and had come home only to slam down everything in the kitchen until James walked in the door and held her on the floor of their kitchen while she cried and shook with unfathomable rage._

_James catching her one day playing the piano so off-key he'd started to howl like a dog._

_Jin and Miles sitting at their table scowling at her as she swept her poker winnings into an ever-growing pile, while James could only laugh at them._

_James bitching about having read everything in the house twice until she'd gone into the kichen, found him a cookbook and told him, "Well, then get started on that, buddy."_

_Her and Amy painting their toenails out in the garden._

_The night she was cleaning out their pantry and he snuck in there and started taking off her clothes while she still had cans of beets in her hands._

_Those ugly brown goggles she wore down at the motor pool, and how once when James wasn't really paying attention, he'd put them on instead of his reading glasses, and she'd teased him for a week._

_How James could never figure out how to fold the fitted sheets and how he'd complain when she used his razor to shave her legs._

_That morning they'd both called in sick and stayed in bed all day, and it had nothing to do with needing more sleep._

_The way he'd hover over her kissing her collarbone until she couldn't even stand it anymore._

_That day, the last horrible fucking day, when she told him she never wanted to remember._

_The pain the white light the black dark the two men standing over her: "please," "her," "anything," "alive."_

The sounds she was making weren't even human anymore. She pulled on her Wellies, jammed her arms into her trenchcoat and burst from her tent, stormed into the jungle. Didn't even bother to flinch when tree branches hit her in the face. It felt good. It felt fucking great.

She thought she wasn't going anywhere in particular until after an hour she reached the empty crater where the Dharma barracks would be built in 40 years. She picked up handfuls of dirt and hurled them into the edge of the basin, the wind spreading the dirt before it could slap back down with any satisfying force. She did this many times until she realized it didn't make any difference, anyway.

"WHY?!" she screamed into the wind that mercilessly whipped her hair around her face, smearing cold tears. "WHY ARE YOU KEEPING ME HERE?!" She screamed and screamed to no one.

Swoosh.


	11. When to Keep Quiet

**By the way, folks? Yep, swine flu confirmed. The worst of it was Wednesday but I'm quarantined totally until I'm allowed to go to work Monday, annnnd I don't feel like doing much else other than writing, so here I am with another update.**

**Anyway, this is an extremely short chapter but I wanted to put it out there as is. We will proceed with our regularly scheduled chaptering shortly.**

* * *

_"There was nothing in this world that was not a con, suddenly I understood this. Nothing really mattered, and nothing could be lost."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

----- FLASHBACK CONTINUED (1920) ------

Juliet walked through the chilly air with her eyes to the ground. She'd been gone all day; she'd managed to reduce her grief into a cold, hard pearl. It was dark now and she kept her eyes on the ground because she didn't know how to look at the world at that moment.

So she didn't see the man crossing her path until she slammed right into him. She snapped her head up, her mouth opening in a silent "oh!" and Richard Alpert was there with his hands up apologetically.

"Juliet, right?"

"Yes." She'd been there four months, Ben had been gone a month, and she hadn't seen Richard yet. In fact, before Ben had disappeared, she'd overheard him bitching to someone about how Richard had been purposely avoiding him. She'd play this hand a little differently. She'd spent half the day screaming into the wind and she was as hoarse as hell. She raised her chin, met his eyes. "I assume this is the part where I'm supposed to pretend I've never met you before."

Richard looked genuinely shocked for a moment. "You're a traveler?"

She knew he wasn't shocked she was time traveling so much as he was shocked she was bringing it up. "And I suppose this is the part where you pretend you don't know who I am."

"Well, I've never met you," Richard said in that loud half-laugh he thought was so fucking intimidating. Yet he wasn't responding to her challenge, not directly.

"Magna res est vocis et silentii temperamentum," she said. The great thing is to know when to speak and when to keep quiet.

"Well, I suppose the same could be said for you," he replied, recovering quickly. "Are you on your way back to the village?"

"Yes."

"So am I. May I walk with you?"

"Yes. Where's your torch?" This was sort of fun; she decided she liked unnerving him.

"No torch this time. What happened to your face?"

_Nice one._ "Got in a fight with some trees."

"That wasn't a very good idea."

Juliet smirked. "You should see the trees."

"Fair enough."

"So. The way I see it, you can either tell me what Ben told you about me, or we can just maintain an uneasy silence the rest of the way. It's your choice."

"It doesn't matter what he said."

"Whatever he told you, I'm not working with Ben."

"If I required you show me the mark on your back, Juliet, I'm afraid you wouldn't be able to say that."

Juliet showed no reaction, but she didn't know what he meant. The mark had signified her as an outsider, but it hadn't banished her from her people. Technically, she had defected. She said nothing.

Dried leaves crunched under their feet. Finally Richard said, "Ben's allegiance lies elsewhere now. And I was surprised to see you in the jungle tonight."

Oh, he was _not_ getting the upper hand in this. "I'm not with Ben," she said expressionlessly. "I'm just here to survive."

"When are you coming from?"

"Shouldn't you know that already?"

Richard looked annoyed. "Ben told me you were there from 2001 until at least very early 2005, but he didn't know what had become of you after that."

"Trust me, he knows." Juliet didn't need to lay down the whole hand here.

They'd arrived at the edge of the village, and she realized she was starving. She hadn't eaten in almost 24 hours. "We done here?" she said.

"Yes."

She started to walk away.

"Juliet."

Oh, always with the last-minute turn-inducing request. Must have been where Ben learned it from. She didn't turn, though, kept her eyes trained on the campfires ahead. "Yes?"

"Latet anguis in herba." A snake lies in the grass.

"Doesn't it always," she said bitterly, and walked away.

------ END FLASHBACK ------

She's sitting on the floor in Rachel's living from with her sister's laptop in front of her and a pad of paper and a pen in her lap, when Jonah comes in and asks the second of three impossible questions.

"Can we go back to the island just to visit?"

Juliet looks up, unsure what brought this on and scared of it. She's long worried to herself about the pull of the island on those born there and taken away; look at Miles.

Look at Charlotte.

She puts down her paper and pen, reaches out to grasp his upper arms, looks him straight in the eye. "No, we can't, Jonah. Listen to me, Jonah. Don't ever, ever go back there, all right? This is very important. Not even when you're all grown-up. Are you listening to me? Jonah. Don't ever go back there."

Jonah's mouth widens a little; she feels bad for scaring him, but she knows the fear is what will make him remember most, and that's all that matters.

"Yeah," he stammers.

* * *

**Please leave a review! I'm quarantined and lonely. :(**


	12. Goddamn July

_"It doesn't really feel like driving when you don't know where you're going. There should be an option on the car for driving in place, like treading water. Or at least a light that shines between the brake lights that you can turn on to indicate that you have no destination."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

**Sept. 22, 2004-July 2007**

Sawyer had returned from Australia confused and worn-out from murdering Duckett. First thing he did was beat the crap out of his fucking cell phone and go find a new apartment in a different neighborhood. He was fucking done with Hibbs, that was for sure. He couldn't explain what kept him from going after the son of a bitch, though. Hibbs definitely deserved to have the crap kicked out of him, and Sawyer supposed he should be the one to give Hibbs what he deserved, but somehow beating the crap out of someone just for fun had lost its luster.

Those first few months after Australia, he really did feel lost. Like he'd forgotten something he didn't know he had. He nearly burned his Dear Mr. Sawyer letter, but at the last minute, something in his throat tightened, and he shoved it into a bottom drawer, kicked the desk, left a scuff mark.

So Sawyer started a new letter, this one to Cassidy. Apologizing to her, asking her if please he could see his daughter. Just a page long. After a month, when no reply had come, he wrote another one. Nothing. So he wrote another. Hell, all he had was time, really.

Meantime he found a night job working security at some mall. He wasn't really sure when he'd ever been interested in security, and the pay was shit, but goddamn, they didn't even bother with a background check, and he figured he might as well start taking some classes during the day if he didn't have nothing better to do.

The women, too, now that was something strange. He'd spent much of his time looking at women to see what he could get outta them, one way or another, but somehow even thinking about it made him feel sick now. He actually tried to play nice with a couple blondes he met, and funny since blondes had never been his type before, unless they were just marks. But he just couldn't work his head around things these days, kept breaking things off before they could get too attached. Couple rolls in the hay weren't so damn bad, though.

He was done running cons, though, that was for damn sure. All that had ever been was some huge damn headache.

Finally after about four months' worth of letters, he got a response. Cass was pulling up stakes, getting married, and they were moving from Albuquerque the following month. "You keep saying you want to see her but why don't you get that we're trying to start new? You want to call her, though, fine, stop writing, it's not the olden days, the number's at the bottom." He waited a day and a half before dialing with a shaky hand. Clem was three and shy, but he called three times that first week and three times the next, and finally Cassidy told him that he could visit once they were settled into their new place.

He rang in 2005 sitting by himself in his living room with a bottle of rum. Weird, too, he didn't even really _like_ rum.

_Whatcha celebratin'?_

_I'm not celebrating._

How was that for deja vu, he couldn't pick out where that thought came from. In his sleep that night he saw a pair of blue eyes the color of the ocean, clouded with rum and sorrow. And he couldn't figure out why he was so confused the next morning to find the pillow next to him empty. Late-morning sun filled the room and he touched the cold pillowcase, trying to remember something that was never even there.

He sold the Benz he'd used while running his last batch of cons and paid cash for a beat-up olive-green Jeep. Thing was ugly as hell but for some reason, he felt drawn to it. First thought had been to go looking for an electric-blue one, at which point he decided he needed a damn strong cup of coffee (strong enough to fake a heart attack over) and get his damn head out of the sand.

Clem was great, though. Eventually, he got out of L.A., and with Cassidy's permission, he moved up to be nearer his daughter. Cass started popping out a new family with whatshisname, her husband, and Sawyer got even more time with his daughter. Eventually they worked up to week on, week off. He never would have believed it.

For some reason, though, July every year sent him off his fucking rocker. An inexplicable tightness gripped his chest. He'd drink too much almost every night. Call in sick to work too many times, skip classes, blow off projects. He'd put on a good front for Clem, but after she was back with Cass again, he'd find himself pacing and raging.

One night he broke every glass in his kitchen for no reason. Another time he found a can of beets in the pantry, opened the back door and hurled it into the yard hard as he could. Beets? Seriously, now what had they ever done to him? Didn't even like beets, though, couldn't remember why he'd bought them.

He bought an axe and went after a small ugly pine tree in his yard until it was shredded nearly into pulp, and then he ripped the twigs from the branches. Until his palms were sticky with sap, studded with splinters.

Not that any of it helped. Goddamn July. That was some crazy fucked up month and he didn't even know why. All he knew was it couldn't end fast enough. All he knew was that there wasn't enough shit to break in the world during the month of July.


	13. A Make Believe, Yellow House Life

_"It is the one amazing piece of evidence of her self. Her very own self, sung in the only voice she had, a voice that she somehow decided was good enough."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

Juliet is sprawled across the bed on her stomach, her head tucked into her arm, trying to bear the latest headache threatening to rip its way through her skull. Footsteps shuffle into the room with the soft clicking, dragging sound of untied shoelaces "You need to tie your shoes, buddy," she mutters, even though she knows he can't yet.

"Do it for me?"

She sits up slowly, trying to keep her eyes closed from the light as much as possible. She squints as she ties his laces and feels him brush his hand across her forehead.

That's when he asks the third impossible question of the week. "Do I have a father?"

------ FLASHBACK (1920) ------

Juliet was sitting out by the fire, alone in the dark when she felt the first pain. Darting her eyes across the landscape for Alice or Dottie or Nicholas or even Richard, she remembered how late it was; she was out here by herself because she hadn't been able to sleep comfortably for weeks and there was nothing else to do. Squeezed her eyes shut. Breathed. And it seemed like it was over before it begun.

She gazed across the footstep-scuffed dirt of their clearing, their village, and up at the edge of the treeline in the distance. And felt, not for the first time, the knife of a deep and permanent loneliness. How could she have come so far from everything and everyone she's always known, with no expectation that she'll do anything except die on this island?

Hot tears in her eyes and she blinked them back. Blinked again. When that didn't work anymore, she used the back of her hands over and over unless it was useless and she cried silently until she felt the pressure again. She held her breath for half a minute even though she knew she wasn't supposed to, and then it was over.

Juliet put her arms on her knees and buried her face into the crook of her elbow._ James. James, please be alive somewhere. James. Please find me. Please find us._

Nothing more for maybe twenty minutes. A long time apart. Maybe it wasn't anything yet. "Ow. Ow ow ow OW." She squeezed her eyes shut, watched the flames of the campfire dancing on the insides of her eyelids.

Suddenly, irrationally, she wanted her mother, who'd been dead since Juliet was in med school, or somewhere out in this world, hasn't even been born yet. When Juliet was little, her mother could always make anything better: the magic of mothers. _Will I be able to do that?_ She wanted to take this all back, right now. And suddenly, irrationally, she wished she'd died in that hole after all. She wished that even with the baby turning in her, even thinking she just knew it was a girl and having picked her name, even with the tiny clothes washed and folded on the shelf in her cabin, just waiting for a tiny bean of a body to wear them.

When the next pain came, it started to feel more real. It wasn't any stronger than the first ones, really; it was just that it was making itself known. She laced her fingers together so it was like she was holding her own hand.

It was just a quiet senseless panic settling over her, she knew, considering the place and the time and the dark. But that was the problem with linear time. There was no going back, ever. Juliet remembered James reading Slaughter-House Five over and over and teasing him about it, a time traveler reading a book about a time traveler. But now she wishes she could live in the world of that book, slide back and forth through the good and the bad in life, endure a little, treasure a little, measure out the pain and the joy. Instead of nothing but bad, then three years of wonderful, and then nothing but this, _this_, here, now, for the rest of her life.

But the character in that book couldn't do anything to change the course of his life. He could live it out of order and know everything, but he couldn't help himself. And that was the one thing, or maybe it _would_ be the one thing, that she can do for myself. And for this baby, her daughter, she was certain.

All of a sudden she felt like maybe she could do this after all, and that's when she stood to wake Alice.

* * *

So fucking hot in this cabin, the sun streaking through the windows and she'd been at this all night and now the sun was up. Alice was trying to give her water and Juliet wouldn't let go of her hand and she was trying to drink but all she wanted was Alice's hands that are not James' hands but at least they were something, and Dottie was checking her and she still had four centimeters to go and she was trying to remember what it was like to be under several feet of ocean water, the cool salty feel and anything to get out of this million-degree cabin with the sun streaking through and her back aching, her body drenched in sweat.

Dottie wiped her forehead and gave her a sympathetic gaze. "Omne initium est difficile." Every beginning is difficult.

"Fuck your Latin," she cried.

She kept thinking of James and she knew she was crying out for him and wanted to stop crying for things she would probably never have again, but she was delirious with pain and jealous of all those women she'd helped deliver, before this island, with epidurals and IV drips and air conditioning.

Anything, she would give up anything if she could just have James here with her for today, just this one day, that wasn't so much to ask for, was it? She winced as the baby's foot hooked under her rib and didn't understand how it was supposed to ever get from inside her to somehow out in this world, with her, here, now.

Alice was trying to tie Juliet's hair up off her neck and suddenly she couldn't stand anyone touching her, she started smacking Alice's hands off her hair and Alice instantly backed off.

"James!" she screeched.

* * *

Her son was born at 4:16 p.m. on June 23, the summer solstice of 1920. Skinny curled-up legs, round baby belly, his head nearly bald except for a small tuft of hair sticking up in the center of his head like a mohawk. Her baby was a punk, and boy was he pissed about being born.

She shifted slightly, and _I feel like I have been run over by a bus_. She couldn't help but smile when she realized the implications of that statement. Someone getting run over by a bus started this all, after all. And she couldn't feel too angry about what got her to the island -- not right at this moment, when this other moment was just waiting to happen.

Dottie finished whatever she was doing that Juliet was trying not to think about too much, and Alice turned to Juliet, holding the baby, wiped off and diapered and wrapped in a cotton blanket. "You ready?" she said.

Juliet nodded, wanted to reach out her arms, too tired. She rolled to her side and Alice tucked the bundle into the crook of her elbow.

His hands. She couldn't stop looking at his tiny hands, his impossibly small fingernails. He'd seemed so huge when he was still inside her, and now he was the smallest small thing she'd ever seen. He had James' ears, of all things.

Oh, the way she'd been screaming for James. That moment and this seemed separated by a vast ocean.

She wanted to sleep, but then she didn't. She couldn't. She just wanted to watch him breathe. She wanted to forget everything else. So she lay in bed, watched him breathe, and thought about nothing more than that.

------ END FLASHBACK ------

Juliet closes her eyes completely for as long as she dares. "Do you have a father," she repeats, not as a question. She opens her eyes. The room is dim, it's nearly past sunset. "Want to lie down with me?" she says.

He nods and climbs onto the bed. She lies down again, on top of the light green duvet, and he puts his head on her stomach like he's done ever since he was a toddler. She closes her eyes and brushes her hand across his forehead like he'd just done to her.

"Julian said he didn't have a father at first so you helped him get born, but now Brian's gonna be his father."

"That's right."

"So..."

"You used to have a father," she says, her eyes still closed. "He liked to read a lot, just like you do. He kept people safe. He was funny. You have his ears, his exact same ears." She tugs on his earlobe and he giggles. "We lived in this funny little yellow house. He didn't know about you, but I know he would have loved you, as much as I do. His name was James."

"Was he on the island too?"

"Yeah, buddy. He was. For a little awhile, I think. Not as long as I was there with you."

"But where did he go?"

"I'm trying to find that out."

"Oh."

She has exhausted every feasible listing for James Fords and Jim LaFleurs she can dream of. The truth is, the threads of her doubts still dangle, he could be anywhere, maybe using a different name. Or dead. She's looked up the numbers for private investigators but it seems so overly dramatic. An overly dramatic solution for her ridiculously implausible life.

She knows some things now, though.

She knows now that Oceanic 815 never crashed.

She knows Jack Shephard attempted suicide in 2007 and lost his medical license for substance abuse in 2008.

She knows Hugo Reyes owns a chicken franchise in Los Angeles.

She knows Kate Austen was not so lucky this time, and while the charges were dropped in the murder case, she still served three years in the New Mexico Women's Correctional Facility for armed robbery. There's no trace of her now.

There's no trace of Miles, not Miles Straume or Miles Chang.

She doesn't know how to find anything out about Sayid, or Sun and Jin.

But she assumes that means James is in the right time, and (if she forces herself to be logical) probably alive. But what if he doesn't remember? If he doesn't remember her, their make-believe yellow-house life. If the reset worked for their plane, it probably worked for their memories, too. Wasn't that what Jack's perfect plan was supposed to be all about?

Not remembering.

But then she remembers the day Jonah was born, the hours she spent screaming for James, and by the time she held that baby, her mind finally stopped. Now she lies with her son in the dark and wishes for that escape again.


	14. Maybe It's Not Maybelline

**OK, I've been making KaydenceRei and eyeon too sad, and I'm still in bed with swine flu, sooooo.**

* * *

_"It still counts, even though it happened when he was unconscious. It counts doubly because the conscious mind often makes mistakes."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

**Tuesday, July 16, 2013 **

The damn basement was getting ridiculous again. Clem's crap was everywhere, sheet music and soccer cleats and did Cass ever stop figuring out new activities for the poor kid? Let kids be kids and have some fun for a damn change.

James picks up half a dozen video games -- OK, he was just as guilty as Clem for those -- and shoved them onto a partially empty shelf.

Mainly it was his books threatening to take over, as usual. He's hauled down a few empty boxes, preparing to clean out some space and take unwanted books down to the prison next time. Two of the basement walls were filled with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, but what could you expect? The man spent three years in a damn hippie commune reading the same crappy books two or three or six times each. He starts picking up handfuls of stuff he knows he's not going to reread, and of course fifteen minutes in, he gets distracted, slips on his glasses and starts reading first chapters of things to jog his memory.

He clears out another shelf and touches the first book on the top shelf when his hand recoils. He looks down for a moment, waiting for the swell of emotion to disperse.

Carrie.

He knows what's tucked in between the pages of this book, but he doesn't know if today's a day to torture himself.

He moves on to the next shelf, except he's too distracted, and then he gives in. Reaches up to the top shelf. Slides the photo from its pages.

It's the only picture of her he has, printed onto photo paper from one of those Missing posters back in 2001. Her hair is wildly curly, she's wearing a lab coat over a pale blue blouse, her smile is timid and shy. It's Juliet, but it's not the Juliet he knew.

The only picture of her he has, and it's not his Juliet. But it's something. It's what he has of her.

------ FLASHBACK (2007-2011) ------

The first time they tried it, he was convinced it would work. It _had_ to work.

He forced the information from St. Jack, went to see Eloise Hawking, got the flight number. Forced Jack to take the flight with him, of course. Jackass owed him that much.

Hugo went out of the goodness of his chubby little heart. "I dunno if this is gonna work, dude. Last time we needed, like, a lot of people and the original pilot and everything. We needed, like, a _body_."

"Yeah, well, our happy little island family got the short stick this time, Hugo," Sawyer grumbled. "It's gonna work."

Jack made a weird face, buckled up, ordered a drink. Didn't say much of anything. When the wheels touched down at their planned destination, James ground his teeth, stormed off the plane without looking at Hugo or Jackass, went straight to the ticket booth and booked a return flight.

James returned to Eloise five more times, and each time she looked at him more and more sadly.

He was able to convince Jackass to take one more flight before the doc begged off. "I'm sorry, Sawyer, but you've got to let her go," Jack said over the phone.

Sawyer could hear the clink of ice in Jack's glass. "Yeah, easy for you to say, doc. Say hi to Inmate 4223 for me." He slammed the phone down.

Sun and Jin considered going, just for the hell of it, see if they could have a chance at Ji Yeon, but they changed their minds at the last minute.

"We are too afraid of being separated again," Jin told him over the phone. "I am sorry, Jim. We are going to see about adopting."

Hugo took each of the flights with him, hanging his head lower every time. But it got so that the only thing James had to look forward to, besides spending time with his daughter, was those silent tray-table card games he'd play with Hugo in a dimly lit cabin.

It took four excruciating fucking years to take those six flights; then Eloise shook her head sadly and told him they'd be no more event windows for ten years. He didn't know whether to believe her or not, but he remembered the way she looked at 17, crazy with that rifle, and he shook his head and threw his hands into the air and left that damn creepy church and didn't look back.

Two years ago, he was sitting on a bleacher watching Clem's soccer game when Mr. Guyliner himself sat down next to him.

"Well, well, well, maybe it's Maybelline," he snarled. "What the hell do YOU want?"

Alpert looked at him sadly. "I'm sorry to have to visit like this, Jim. It's never easy to hear news like this. But I know you've been seeing Ms. Hawking. It's very noble of you, really, but you need to let it go. Juliet is dead. She died in the fall. It wasn't like your situation with the plane. I'm sorry."

James struggled to control the rage he felt rising in him; he remembered all the times when Juliet would tell him to shut up in that whisper-soft voice that always got him to listen. He knew anger wouldn't serve him here, especially on the sidelines at a nine-year-old girls' soccer game. "Yeah, well, what if I don't believe you?"

"Well, Jim," Alpert said mildly, "then I suppose you can wait ten years until the next event window, and spend the rest of your life torturing yourself." He stood. "I'm sorry I had to break the news to you this way."

------ END FLASHBACK ------

He still doesn't know if it's true, but there have been times he hopes it is. He hopes it is because he can't stand the thought that Juliet is still there, that she is still waiting for him, that she's stuck there with Bug-Eyes and God knows what else going on there, stuck there, waiting for a rescue that seems to never be coming.

Then there was her sister. He's wanted to visit Rachel, at least call her, but he's never known what to tell her. "Your sister was held against her will for three years before time traveling and dying a horrible death in 1977?" "Your sister is STILL being held against her will but at least she had a good few years there 'til I totally fucked it up and left her there?" Somehow, leaving that stone unturned seemed the kindest thing he could do.

There's half a dozen boxes filled now, and that's good enough for now. He reaches up to the top shelf, takes one last peek at the photo in the book, and tucks it back onto the shelf.

The first floor is shrouded in darkness; he flicks on the kitchen lights and takes a beer from the fridge, wishing for a split second it was that God-awful Dharma beer because of what that would mean. He's got the bottle opener on the cap when the phone in his pocket starts to ring. He fishes it from his pocket.

"Heyyyy, Hugo. How's it hangin'?"

"Dude, are you sittin' down? You're not gonna believe who I just talked to."


	15. Changing the Rules

**Note: I'm pulling a slightly annoying time shift here (and to think I've always hated those only-a-few-days-ago time shifts on the show!), so if you're confused, please check the date on the previous chapter.**

**Also, in another totally inconvenient trick o' temporal insanity, the flashback portion is not chronological with Juliet's previous flashback, so it's before Jonah was born. Oh snap.**

* * *

_"Why did I do this dangerous and inappropriate thing? I'd like to think I didn't do it, that it was in fact done to me."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

**Friday, July 12, 2013 **

Juliet snaps awake in the pitch black, grabs at the space in front of her face, dives for the lamp, blinks in the brightness of nothing. Checks the clock. 4:23 a.m. _Perfect._

She takes several deep breaths, rubs the sleep from her eyes. Since she's been here, she's pushed the bed into the corner of the room (she has to be able to see the door) and now she's managed to wake up sideways in the bed. She presses her back to the wall and from here she can see every corner of the room. It's not enough to calm her down.

Before she knows what she's doing, her fingers graze the raised lines on her back. Juliet drops her hand slowly to the bed.

_Is this all there is? Is this what it's going to be, forever?_

But there is no headache. _They've separated._

She still doesn't know how, exactly, she knows half of what she does. It's the polar opposite of her research on the so-called survivors of the non-existent crash of Oceanic 815. Faith versus science, and wasn't that what Locke and Jack were always going on about, anyway? The beginning of a bitter laugh escapes her before she presses her lips together.

If she were honest with herself, she's known that since she first joined the camp in 1919. And the things she knows (the things she couldn't possibly know, but does anyway) -- sure, those are scary. What's scarier is the things she doesn't.

------ FLASHBACK (1920) ------

The green canopy of the jungle, the light in her eyes. This was becoming a little too familiar these past couple of years.

Something was wrong. It was too hot. Too wet.

She sat up so fast she saw stars. She was covered in blood, it was everywhere, spilled still hot and wet into her clothing, dried in the cracks in her hands. _The baby, oh my God. _Frantically she ran her hands over her belly, over her body, across her head, nothing, no pain anywhere. She felt the baby nudge her, and realized she hadn't been breathing.

Gulping lungfuls of air now, she knew this was not her blood. And it was no magical healing either. This had never been her blood. She knew that now, somehow.

Juliet stumbled to her feet, expecting to feel dizzy. She didn't. She spun in a circle, looking for anyone, any sign of what had happened or where she'd come from. Nothing. She glanced down at her clothes again. She couldn't go back to the village like this, covered in blood with no answers. Richard already suspected she was a mole -- ironic that she'd infiltrated Flight 815's camp so easily with ulterior motives; now here she was just trying to survive, and she was fucking screwed.

But staying utterly calm in stressful situations had always been her specialty, and her mind unspooled in the most logical direction. There was no way she was going to figure out what had just happened -- at least not yet -- so there only moving forward.

She couldn't find any tracks for a long time (damn her tracking, it was the only thing that hadn't come naturally to her); eventually she found the trail of two people that split into two directions. Had one of them been hers?

This was ridiculous; she couldn't even determine if the tracks were coming or going. She paused.

Backwards whispers all around her, every side. She spun around even though that never did a thing, never showed her anything, and then it was coming, clanking scanning grinding whatever the hell that thing was, that noise and she didn't know what direction to run, trapped in a cage of whispers. She could see it in the distance, ripping up trees and she wrapped her arm around her heavy belly and she ran.

She ran. She ran, tripping over a vine and scraping her hand on a tree as she stumbled past, she ran, she ran even though there was no use in running. The smoke was cold, so cold, the coldest cold thing and it was up right on her and then nothing. She instinctively stopped and turned. The pillar of smoke was vertical, it was like a person looking at her. She raised her eyes to the level where eyes would be on that -- thing. And she knew it. And it knew her.

_What do you want from me._

_To have you, of course._

_Don't you already. Ben gave me to you._

_But you saved my brother's life._

_I'm a loophole._

_Talk to my brother._

_I'm not talking to anyone._

_You're talking to me._

_You're not anyone._

_Maybe you're not either._

_I am._

_Only because of me._

_Someone changed the rules._

_You did._

_I'm a pawn._

_Exactly. And when did you ever hear of a pawn changing the rules._

Juliet willed her mind to go blank and her eyes to lose focus. She stilled herself until she was nothing more than the blood in her veins, the blood on her clothes. The smoke lightened until it wasn't there anymore.

She blinked several times. Gone. He was gone. She willed herself to breathe. Suddenly she could hear the birds in the jungle again and knew exactly the way to her camp. She walked slowly, quietly, one foot exactly in front of the other, making no noise, leaving nearly no trace, just like a good little Other.

By the time she returned to the village, the moon was high in the sky and everyone seemed to be asleep. She opened the door to her cabin and dropped onto her bed. Except there was someone already in it. The start of a gasp -- and she felt a hand clap over her mouth.

"Calm down! Juliet! It's me! Alice."

"Oh my god -- Alice -- you scared me. What the hell are you doing here?"

"I was worried about you. I sat down to wait for you and fell asleep." Alice got up and lit the lantern.

Too late, Juliet remembered her clothes.

Horror flashed across Alice's face. "Jules, what happened? Oh my -- do you -- the baby -- "

Juliet shook her head; she didn't know how to play this except to tell the truth. "Alice. It's not my blood."

More horror. "...What?" Alice whispers.

"I don't know what happened, except I woke up in the jungle, exactly like this."

"Are you sure you didn't hit your head or something? Head wounds can bleed a lot," Alice said, her voice full of doubt -- which was fair considering there was even blood on Juliet's knees.

"Alice, please. Promise me you won't tell Richard. I don't know what happened, but he's suspicious of me. If you tell him -- he's going to think the worst. I'm trusting you, Alice, you know he'll banish me. For me, Alice, please, for my baby, just pretend you didn't see this."

Juliet could see the quiet war playing across Alice's delicate features. Alice was, of course, very loyal to Richard -- Juliet knew Alice was fairly high-ranking in their little I'm an Other, You're an Other militia -- but the two of them had grown close. "You know I'm not a mole, Alice. You know I'd never be working for him. Alice, I'm trusting you. You know me. Please. My baby."

If there's one thing Juliet can do, it's lie. It's lie even when it's the truth. It's tell the truth even when she didn't know anymore what the truth was.

Alice stared at her, her eyes big with unasked questions. "Honest to Jacob?"

Juliet looked straight into her eyes. "Honest to Jacob."

------ END FLASHBACK ------

Juliet walks downstairs without turning on a light. She walks down the street without shoes. She walks to the end of the block. She walks to the edge of the neighborhood. She walks to the beach. She walks across the sand. She walks to the edge of a dock.

She dives.

The shock of the cold makes her open her eyes. She knows what she is looking for, and she knows she won't have to wait long. It all happens before she needs to take a breath. It all happens in a flash.

_You were never supposed to be there, you know._

_Then why are you speaking to me now._

_Because you were there._

_I'm not anymore._

_But you saved my life._

_So will I never be free._

_That's not what this is about._

_I'm a loophole._

_Yes, of course._

_When is this going to be done._

_You think I know._

_How am I the one who changed the rules._

_You know._

_I blew up the bomb. The plane never crashed._

_The plane is nothing. Not anymore. Keep trying._

_The rules changed._

_Of course they did._

_Time changed._

_Of course it did._

_Nothing that happened, happened anymore._

_That's not to say nothing. Everything that rises must converge._

_I hate Flannery O'Connor._

_You're ignoring the point._

_Can't you both just leave me alone._

_I'm not the human floating in the ocean at five in the morning._

_You're fighting the war across all times._

_Yes, of course._

_But you didn't always._

_No, of course not._

_So what happens now._

_Omnia iam fient quae posse negabam._

Suddenly Juliet decides she needs to breathe. It's all happened in seconds. She breaks the surface, looks out over the lightening sky. She bobs in the water, holding on to the ladder of the dock.

She thinks about what Jacob had said. "Everything which I used to say could not happen ... will happen now."

She wasn't even short of breath.


	16. Tustin, California

_"I was scared, but not in the way where you decided you would rather die than move or breathe."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

Juliet is back to Rachel's house no later than 6 a.m., the salt drying sticky on her skin, her clothes still wet, her feet bare. But whereas Rachel is still asleep, having taken a temporary leave of absence from work once Juliet had turned up, Brian is in the kitchen, dressed, making coffee.

She stands in the foyer, shivering slightly. He leans against the counter, arms folded, watching her without saying anything.

Juliet can't remember how to slide the mask over her face. She just looks at him with everything in her at this moment, the exhaustion, confusion, sadness written all over her face. She stands there looking at him and he doesn't say anything and she walks up the stairs to the guest room.

In the safety of solitude, she locks the door, peels off her clothes and takes a shower as hot as she can stand. After she's dressed, she creeps to the top of the stairs, listens, hears nothing, and goes to get Rachel's laptop.

She has decided to do the only thing she feels like doing right now, which is to forget about conversations in her head with things that aren't real (oh, she loves telling herself that lie; she could tell it to herself twenty times a day).

If the plane never crashed, then everyone -- everyone -- is alive, unscathed. And if anyone's going to remember, it's John Locke.

Tustin, California is small enough, and there's only one Johnathan Locke, and she smiles oddly as she remembers his file; he always seemed so unlike a Johnathan. But it's too early to call the West Coast now. She writes his number on her pad of paper. And fuck it, she looks up Hugo's too. If memories are intact -- if anyone is in touch with James -- her guess would be Hugo.

Now that she's decided to act, the pointless morning in front of her stretches out infinitely.

* * *

She'd gotten his voicemail that afternoon, but when she dials at 10 p.m. her time, she knows in her stomach that this is it.

"Hello?"

"Hey," she says quietly, knowing it's him. "I'm looking for John Locke. This is Juliet Burke."

She hears his breath hitch. "Juliet?" John exclaims. She can hear the happiness in his voice, and she closes her eyes in gratitude to the universe at this perfect moment and everything that it means.

"Hi. John," she says, her words punctuated by pauses she's using to keep her from crying.

"Juliet! Well, I was wondering if I'd ever hear from you," John says merrily.

"You remember."

"Of course. Well, not everything, but we were able to piece together a lot of it."

"We?"

"Me. Jack. Sun. Sayid."

"You're in touch with them."

"Not so much anymore."

"I thought if you remembered, you might try to get back to the island."

"It doesn't work that way. The island decides who stays and who goes."

"Yeah, well, I noticed."

"When it's my time to go back, I'll go back. But you're not sitting around on a Friday night waiting to talk to _me_, are you?"

"I didn't know who else to talk to," she manages.

"Where have you been all this time?"

"On the island."

"You stayed?" he says incredulously. Awe in his voice.

"Yes, I stayed," she says flatly.

"We didn't think -- when did you remember?"

"What?"

"Then you were with our people, just like before?"

"Not exactly like before," she says, a sudden smile playing on her lips. "John -- you can say no, but would you mind if I came to see you this weekend?"

"No, of course not, Juliet. I'd be happy to speak with you. You know... I'd heard that you were dead."

A cold shiver runs through her. "What?" she whispers.

"I guess maybe I should wait to explain that when we see each other."

She gives him her number, hangs up, books plane tickets to the John Wayne/Orange County Airport.

* * *

"You just got here and you're leaving?" Hurt is flashing across Rachel's face.

"Rach, I've been here a week."

"Six days. And I thought we were going apartment hunting tomorrow."

"Rachel, I have to go see someone. I'll be back, I swear."

"Why don't I trust you?" Her eyes are afraid.

Juliet met her sister's gaze. "I don't know why not, but you can. Nothing's going to happen. I just need to go see someone and get some answers."

"Jonah's father?"

"No. Not yet, anyway. I'm going to see a -- well, I guess a colleague of mine from the island," she says, trying not to laugh. "He might be able to give me a few answers. Or not. I don't know, I guess."

"You know, I was fine without telling Brian about your whole fake identity thing. I've been fine with defending you to him whenever you do or say something that doesn't make any sense. I've been telling him not to pressure you or ask you questions. But things really just aren't making sense for us, Jules."

Juliet smirks, thinking of her little tirade to Richard right before drinking the orange juice. "Things don't always make sense."

"But you've got to think about Jonah. You really think he wouldn't be better off staying here with me and Brian?"

"Jonah will be fine. I'm not leaving him, ever."

"I hope you know what you're doing."

_I never know what I'm doing_, she thinks. "Listen, this is my last night here for a few days at least," Juliet says in a cold tone she knows her sister isn't used to. "Do you want this to be a big fight, or do you want to do something fun?" End of discussion.

* * *

John Locke lives up a long, heavily wooded road. It's exactly the sort of place she would have pictured him living in, a road edged in ridges of hard dirt packed by years of sporadic but heavy rain. It feels later to them than it is, thanks to jet lag, and Jonah's already fallen asleep in the backseat. She hoists him out of his booster seat (he's getting heavy) and he stirs slightly, hooks an arm around her neck.

The house is small, old but well-kept. She rings the bell but no one comes. Finally she hears something in the backyard, walks around the house. John is there, standing (standing!) on his patio, a case full of knives open on the cement. The trees in front of him are pitted and knicked, and Juliet can see at least two knife handles protuding from a trunk.

She laughs.

John turns to her and smiles. "You know, I don't think I ever heard you laugh."

She shakes her head, laughing harder. "Didn't have much to laugh about back then." Jonah twists in her arms, more awake now, and she puts him down.

"Hey there, fella, what's your name?" John asks Jonah.

Jonah looks up at Juliet. "You can tell him," she urges.

He fixes his eyes on Locke. "Jonah."

"Good name. The island always did like J names."

Juliet laughs again. John approaches her, hugs her. She hangs on a little longer than she would have expected.

"It's so good to see you, Juliet."

The light is dancing on an endless yard full of leaves. It's quiet, serene, but not the island. "It's good to see you, too."

* * *

They sit on the patio watching fireflies while Jonah sleeps inside. A citronelle candle sits between them, turns the sweat on their drinking glasses into sparkles. "So the plane never crashed," Juliet says by way of beginning the conversation.

"Can't say that it did." John smiles.

"You're walking."

"The island didn't forget me." He is so serene; she couldn't imagine that he could have been this serene off the island.

"So ... You were just on the plane, and you remembered?"

"That's the strange thing. Sometime on that flight, I realized I could feel my legs. But I didn't know why. I started looking around, and no one seemed to be reacting to anything strange. But I could, I really could move my legs. When the flight was over, I got up and walked out with everyone else. Don't know what the flight attendants must have thought about that," John chuckles.

"When did you remember?"

"August 16, 2007."

"Really. Why?"

"No idea. But the date -- 8/16. It's the number that would be the next after the flight. If you end up talking to Hugo, though, it's probably best not to mention that." He winks.

Juliet thinks. "2007 would probably correspond to the time difference."

"You mean because we were in 2007 when you were in 1977."

"Yes."

"You very well could be right. After I remembered, Jack called me about 15 minutes later."

Juliet can't help rolling her eyes. "Of course."

"A few of us got together -- me, Hugo, Jack. Sun, Jin and Sayid flew in."

(She notices who he's not mentioning.) "And?"

"We tried to piece it together best we could. It was more difficult without you or James there. And I don't remember anything after getting back to the island. What I remember is dying -- off the island."

"Jack told us you'd died."

"Did he tell you how?

Suicide. "No," she lies.

"Ben killed me," John says, the look in his eyes deadly serious.

"Son of a bitch," she mutters.

John's expression lightens slight, and through the semi-darkness, she sees the hint of a smile around his lips. "One thing we weren't sure about is how the reset happened. Jack said threw the bomb in, and -- " He pauses, clearly not knowing how to finish.

"It's OK -- John," Juliet says quietly. "I didn't die down there. I -- picked up a rock, and..." She takes note of the astonishment spreading across his face.

"Then the island couldn't let you die, Juliet. You were meant to detonate the bomb."

"You ever think that sometimes I get a little sick of talking about the island?"

John smiles. "And yet, here you are."

"Yeah," she says quietly. "Here I am."

"So you seemed to indicate on the phone that the reset worked differently for you."

"I'm not sure if there was a reset for me. I woke up in 1919. November. I remembered my first three years on the island pretty much from the beginning, but not the next three -- at least, not at first. Ben got blasted back with me too. I guess I'm not really sure why. Anyway, after a few months, he left. He -- wasn't working for Jacob anymore."

John mulls this over. "I suppose I can't say I'm surprised." He fills her in on what Sun had told him about their time on the island in 2007. Lapidus, Ilana, Ajira 316, what lies in the shadow of the statue, yadda yadda yadda.

Juliet feels something somewhere between nausea and amusement at John's story. Finally when he's through, she locks eyes on him and says, "You know Ben tried to kill Jacob, right?"

"I didn't, but I suspected as much. Could Jacob really be killed, though?"

"Well. I guess Ben sort of did kill him." She presses her fingers to her lips, thinking. "As far as I can tell, Jacob still exists, but he doesn't have a body anymore. It's almost like he's smoke, but -- he's water."

Surprise registers on John's face. They sit in silence for awhile, watching fireflies. One lands on Juliet's wrist and she cups her other hand over it, watches through the space between her fingers as it blinks.

"You know, James came to see me a few years ago."

She flicks her wrist, sends the firefly off. "What?"

"He was trying to find out how to get back to the island. He'd been flying on Ms. Hawking's routes, but they weren't working. He couldn't get enough people to make a difference. No one wanted to get involved except Hugo. I would have gone, but -- when the island wants me, I'll know it."

Juliet knows too many emotions are playing across her face. "How was he? What did you tell him?"

"Sad. Angry. I told him I couldn't help him. I'm sorry, Juliet. James had already been to see Widmore."

"Oh God."

"Widmore had him beaten up a couple of times. Nothing worse than that. But it was clear that wasn't going to work. Last I heard, he was trying to find Faraday."

"How long ago was that? John? How long ago?"

"Oh, few years now."

"Tell me he didn't go back there," she says, starting to panic.

"No, not last I heard. Hurley calls me know and then, keeps me up to date a bit. Hasn't mentioned James lately, but I'm sure he would have told me, if..."

"Where is he?" she whispers.

John frowns. "I'm sorry, Juliet. Somewhere up north. I can't remember. Washington, Oregon? Hurley would know. I can give you his number."

"I think I found his number, like I found yours."

"I know James will want to hear from you."

A wave of exhaustion washes over her. She can't talk about this without crying right now. She's so sick of being used for everyone's purposes but her own. "I think I need to get some sleep.

The jet lag."

"Of course."

She picks up her glass, stands, stretches.

"A boy should know his father, Juliet."

"I know," she says. She walks into the house, shutting the door quietly behind her.


	17. Alive, With an iPhone

_"Is she still out there?"_

_"No, she's gone."_

_"How does anyone ever let go of anything?"_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

Juliet sleeps in Locke's spare room with Jonah, finds a perfect dark bottomless dreamless sleep. Her mind is perfectly clear when she opens her eyes. It's early, maybe 7 a.m. Early morning sunlight filters through the blinds.

Jonah's half sideways, his head on her stomach, and she wants to move, but then she doesn't. She thinks about her next set of fears about James; is there ever any bottom to them? So he remembers. So he wanted to find her. She closes her eyes against the growing brightness of the room. She breathes clear, cool air from the cracked-open window.

Just because he wanted to find her a few years ago doesn't mean he's been pining away for her ever since. And God knows she found a way to wile away more than a handful of lonely nights when Alice was looking after Jonah.

She realizes she is afraid to show him how broken she feels these days. (Isn't that why she's half-running from her sister right now?)

In Dharmaville, she and James had come to each other out of a mutual pain. It wasn't what kept them together, but part of it was finding a way to prop each other up, soothe each other's wounds. She thinks about April 8, 1976, the day his parents died, and how he'd stormed around the house all day not talking until he woke her up past midnight that night, kissing her eyelids, smelling of alcohol. She hadn't asked him any questions; she hadn't needed to. They had each other's backs.

And she still hates herself for throwing that away in a moment of jealousy. Especially considering how the next half a dozen years has worked out for her.

She wills her mind to go perfectly still. There isn't any point to thinking about this. She wants her son to know his father.

That's all, she tells herself.

* * *

They spend another day and a half with John, hiking with Jonah, sorting out questions both she and John still have. She tells him as much as she's willing to about her time on the island, the ways she was manipulated, consciously and unconsciously. Jonah is sailing leaves down a stream when John turns to her, smiling that small mysterious smile of his. "It's funny if you think about it."

"What is?"

"You see the island as having used you, rather than what it's done for you."

"Well, I'm no former paraplegic." (She pushes away the memory of watching him in 2004. The monitors at the Arrow.)

"So you think it's fair to say that the island has taken more from you than it's given."

"You think?" she says, keeping her eyes away from him.

"Then maybe the island owes you."

She thinks about the weak, timid, passive mouse she'd been before the island; thinks about the broken person staying strong for inexplicable reasons now. But her words are bitter. "I think the only good the island did for me was not killing me outright, and it sure as hell did try."

"It let you leave when you were finally ready, Juliet."

"Guess that's one point for the island."

John smiles, stays silent.

"So," she says. "We gonna talk about the elephant in the room?"

"We're not in a room, Juliet, we're in the woods." John's green eyes twinkle, but she can't help rolling her eyes. John's expression turns serious again. "The war."

Juliet strips some leaves from a nearby bush. "The war."

"What you've told me seems to go against the concept of time travel as we understand it. It was always -- whatever happened, happened. If the war is happening now across all times... but that's not my area of expertise. I think you'll have to talk to Daniel Faraday for that."

"Me? Well, I'm not interested." She rips up the leaves in her hand, lets them fall to the ground. "I'm out of this, John. I'm retired, OK? I just though you should know."

She regrets her words as soon as they're out of her mouth.

* * *

Is she running from Rachel, is that what she's doing? And all along she's said she wasn't the running type. (That was someone else.)

Hugo's number's been going to voicemail all weekend. Around noon on Monday, she packs her rental car with their belongings -- they're up to a suitcase and a tote bag; it's an improvement -- and she and Jonah drive to Long Beach. She checks them into a needlessly expensive hotel just for the hell of it. She spend the most of the next two days running around the beach with Jonah, batting around an inflatable beach ball, reading, swimming, not thinking. She calls Rachel once, tells her she's still with John.

Tuesday night once Jonah's settled with cartoons (she's already turning into one of those parents, she can tell and she doesn't like it), she tries Hugo's number again.

"Hey."

"Hugo? This is Juliet Burke."

There's a long pause. Finally in a trembling, drawn-out voice, he says, "Oh dude. I finally get dead people to stop following me around and now they're calling me on the freakin' phone?!"  
She hears his voice traveling further away from the phone and he hangs up.

Now what was _that_ all about? She gives the device in her hand a crazy look and redials.

"What?!" Hurley says.

"I'm not dead. Don't hang up!"

"Dude... Juliet? Seriously? You're alive?!"

"Yeah, Hurley, I'm alive. I don't think they let dead people have iPhones, do they?"

"What happened to you?" Hugo says in a frantic voice. "Sawyer and me, we took like all these flights to try to get back to the island, 'cause we were looking for those event window thingies? Like when Jack and me and everyone went back to you guys in 1977? But none of 'em ever worked, and then Ms. Hawking said there wouldn't be any more for, like, 10 years. So Sawyer went and got beat up by Widmore's bodyguards in London, and then we went to Oxford, and then that eyeliner guy, what was his name again -- "

"Richard Alpert," Juliet supplies quietly.

"Yeah, right, so Richard Alpert showed up at Sawyer's daughter's soccer game and told him you were dead. 'Cept he didn't really believe him but I sorta did because that guy is freaky, you know?"

She thinks of a time when Richard was scared of _her_. Oh, now those were the days. "Hugo, where is James now?" she says in a perfectly calm voice.

"He lives, like, a little bit outside of Portland?"

Juliet almost has to put the phone down. "Oh for Christ's sake," she groans.

"What's so weird about Portland?"

"Nothing. It's a long story," she manages. "Do you have his number?"

"Yeah! Hang on."

So this is all it takes. Six years coming down to something so simple as Hugo finding her the number. She would be thrilled if she could figure out how to feel anything. Hugo reads her a stream of numbers and she writes them down on the last page of her pad of white paper from the hotel in Amsterdam.

"Hey, he's not, like, dating anyone right now, in case you were wondering."

"I just wanted to talk to him," she says, glad they're over the phone and he can't see her shy smile.

* * *

Ten minutes later she calls him back. "Can I ask you a favor, Hugo?"

"Dude. Anything."

"Could you please call him for me?" she says, rolling her eyes at herself. She's acting like she's in middle school. "I'm afraid of freaking him out." _I'm afraid of freaking myself out._

"Uh... Yeah," he replies, surprise in his voice. "Uh... What do you want me to tell him?"

"Um, tell him I'm alive?" she says a little more sarcastically than she'd intended to be. "I don't know, just tell him you talked to me and I'm OK and give him my number like we're 13 years old in study hall or something."

"Got it."


	18. Guess You Will

_"You are the sweetest thing in the universe."_

_"I am?_

_"Yeah, by a long shot."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

The next five minutes seem about three times as long as they should. Jonah's gotten bored of cartoons -- maybe she won't end up one of _those_ parents after all -- and he's rummaging through the tote bag looking for his crayons. She's sitting on the floor, her back against the wall, her gaze fixed on the pattern in the carpet.

(She's trying to breathe slowly to calm her thudding heart.)

When the phone rings (it's still clutched in her hand), it startles her. She looks at the screen. S_lide to unlock. _"Hello?"

The voice is low, frantic, growling. "Tell me it's really you."

She squeezes her eyes shut against the tears. "It's really me."

* * *

**Eight Minutes Earlier **

He's got the bottle opener on the cap when the phone in his pocket starts to ring. He fishes it from his pocket. "Heyyyy, Hugo. How's it hangin'?"

"Dude, are you sittin' down? You're not gonna believe who I just talked to."

"Yeah, who'd you just talk to?"

"Uh. Did I not just tell you to sit down?"

"I am sittin' down," he lies, rolling his eyes. "Who the hell did you talk to?"

"Juliet."

His knees buckle, his back slides along the fridge and he finds himself sitting down after all. "What?" he whispers.

"Yeah, dude, you were right, she's alive. I got her number an' everything. You got a pen?"

"Yeah, what for?" he growls.

"Uh, don't you want her number?"

"You sure she even wants to talk to me?"

"You think she was really callin' to shoot the shit with me? C'mon, Sawyer -- just write down her number, dude. Don't be a dumbass."

James gets to his knees, thrusts a hand into the drawer next to the fridge, pulls out a pen. He writes Juliet's phone number on his forearm because he's shaking too bad to go off looking for paper right about now. "Hugo. You gotta tell me -- was she on the island all this time?"

"I dunno, I guess forgot to ask her a lotta questions. I was kinda freaked out, you know? But I told her about all the stuff you did, to try to find her."

"Yeah, well, it wasn't good enough," he mutters.

"I don't think she, like, blames you or anything. She said for you to call her." Hugo is really way too excited about all this. If Juliet has any sense, she would want to cut his heart out and serve it to him on a silver platter for breakfast.

They hang up.

And he has no intention of dragging this out past tonight. One way or another, he's gotta know. Her number is written shaky over his skin and he holds out his arm, feeling the blood rush through his arm and he presses the sequence into his phone.

"Hello?"

If he weren't sitting on his kitchen floor right now he thinks he's be laying flat on his back. "Tell me it's really you," he chokes.

There's a long pause, almost painfully long. "It's really me," she says quietly.

All he can feel is the memory of that cool dark green pole against his face the moment after she let go. The moment when, if he'd had any strength or courage left, he would have dived headfirst down that fucking hole right after her. He presses his fist against his forehead. "You all right?" is all he manages.

"Yeah. James. I'm all right," she says, even more quietly than before.

"You're -- in Miami?"

"I'm in California." Her words now are so quiet he strains to hear her, it's like she's disappearing already. Again.

"What -- uh, where you been? Uh, I mean -- before now." _I am the biggest asshole in the world. There is no bigger asshole than me, ever, anywhere._

"Running around in the jungle. Shooting at things. Having book clubs. You know, the usual." She sounds congested and he realizes maybe it sounds like she's crying and trying to hide it.

"You've been there... the whole time?" he whispers. His hand is sweaty around the phone.

"I've been off... uh, I guess it'll be two weeks tomorrow, your time."

"My time."

"Well. You know how it is there."

She's not saying anything and neither is he. The thought of her stranded on Craphole Island for twelve years, without her sister, with everything that place loved to throw at people -- especially her, of everyone... All of a sudden he is crying outright, the way he hasn't cried since August 16, 2007, crying not for his guilt, shame, self-loathing but for her. Just for her.

"Since when are you the crying type?" she asks, and he can hear her voice trembling, and he laughs through a sob that rolls through his chest.

"I don't know, since the '70s. Ya know, men really knew how to get in touch with their sensitive sides back then."

"If you're still wearing those purple paisley shirts, I'm gonna think you have some sort of problem."

Thank God she still had her sense of humor; even if she was putting up a wall with it, at least she was bothering. At least she wanted to bother. He shakes his head several times, trying to get his bearings back. "What are you doin' in California? 'Cause if I recall correctly, you seemed to spend a lotta time wanting to get back somewhere clear on the other side of the country from there."

"I went to see John."

He is suddenly, acutely aware of Secret Island Business, and he thought he'd left that all behind long ago. "Locke? What for, the West Coast meetup to plan OtherCon '13?"

"More or less." She pauses. "Hang on a sec?"

He hears her crush her hand over the phone, hears her murmuring, waits through the static. In a moment, she's back. "Sorry."

"That Locke?"

"What? Oh. No," she says, still obviously distracted.

This is more strained than he'd expected. Then again, he never really thought about what to expect. Never really let himself think about something like this, being able to just call her up on the damn phone like any normal person in any normal world living any normal life. And he doesn't know what to say, doesn't know how much to press her, how much he can ask without her breaking down or screaming at him. "You're really OK?"

"Yes, James, I'm really OK," she says, and pauses. "How are you?"

"Me? Uh, I'm fine, I guess. Got Clementine with me half the time. You wouldn't believe kids these days."

"No, I guess I wouldn't." He hears a smile in her voice. "I'm glad you found your daughter, James."

Another awkward pause. "So, uh ... How'd you get off the island?"

"Back door."

"Huh?"

"Same way Locke did. Down the well at the Orchid. Well, before it was the Orchid. I took a ladder this time, though. It was much easier that way. I highly recommend it."

He's picked up on her "before the Orchid" comment. What the hell? He doesn't want to ask the next question, but there are probably about a thousand questions he doesn't want to ask, and she's clearly not volunteering much. "So ... with the reset ... you just woke up again, an' you were with the Others?"

"Not exactly."

Awkward pause. "Uh... You wanna clarify that at all? My mind readin' skills slipped some since Dharmaville."

"There wasn't a reset for me, James," she tells him in the same icy voice that used to make his blood run cold when he'd committed a serious life-altering mistake like leaving the toilet seat up. "Fell down the hole, set off the bomb, time flashed back to 1919, stayed 'til '25. That's what it was."

"You -- " He can't process this. That she survived that fall, she was alone at the bottom of that pit, broken bones, bleeding, alive, alone alone alone and she still summoned the strength to set off that fucking bomb while he doubled over and cried and did nothing, nothing -- he can't get the words out, she saved them all, she saved hundreds of lives and lay there alone, only to face six more years there, freaking ninety years ago? "Juliet. I -- am -- so -- sorry."

"Why? _You_ didn't throw in the bomb."

"You know why I'm sorry," he mutters, his eyes closed.

"James, that was a long time ago," she says like it really doesn't matter one bit, like it's had no effect on her or her life or the past six years of whatever shit she's been through. Nope, none whatsoever. "I didn't call you for apologies." He hears mumbling in the background again. "Sorry -- hang on." She clamps her hand over the phone again and he hear her murmuring, a little more impatient than last time. "Sorry. Hi."

He realizes he's wondering if she has some man there with her, some Island of Mystery spy she smuggled back through with her. _Oh, the hell with it. _"You got someone there with ya who sounds mighty impatient for you to get off the phone."

Her voice is softer, more friendly now. "He'll be fine."

He remembers her on the dock, telling him, _You'll be fine. _That he could really be fine without her. Well, he's been doing all right, but he couldn't really say it was _fine_, not by a long shot. So he presses her. "Secret island lover?"

"No. My son."

"Your -- " His stomach turns to ice. "You have a son." Immediately he's running the worst scenarios through his head, and there are plenty of them.

She doesn't say anything for a long time. He realizes maybe she wouldn't have said anything if he hadn't asked. He presses his ear to the phone -- he hates that they're doing this over the phone, he wants to see her, so badly -- and tries to figure out if he detects a muffled sob. Realizes he's not sure.

Finally she says, so quietly it's nearly a whisper, "Yeah. I have a son. Jonah. He's -- five and a half."

"Jesus, Juliet, is he -- " he lowers his voice to match her whisper. "I mean, is he..."

She responds in the clipped tone he recognizes as her I-know-I'm-giving-too-much-away-but-I-can't-help-it voice. "Yes, James. Yeah. He's yours."

* * *

When it came right down to it, she couldn't do it. Couldn't come right out with it.

She's immediately, almost involuntarily, found herself putting up a wall with him. Afraid to share too much, afraid if she started talking she wouldn't be able to stop. Wouldn't be able to stop crying. She realizes partway through her series of clipped, one-word answers -- she wanted to kick herself, this was _ridiculous_, she's the one who'd wanted to speak to _him_ -- that she has literally no game plan whatsoever for what to tell him about Jonah.

But when he asks her straight out, she suddenly can't remember how to lie.

And now James is stumbling over apologies and questions and Jesus Christ he's insanely guilty, it's driving her crazy, the last thing she fucking needs right now is pity, she realizes she's not even paying attention to half of what he's saying she is so fucking uncomfortable she wishes she were in the ocean water over her head her eyes open sorting things out instead of here on this hotel room carpet talking to the person she'd screamed for at the edge of the crater where the Dharma barracks would be built.

And realizing now they're in a maze that's grown up around them in the interim, and they're wandering around, calling for each other, trying to catch glimpses and only seeing shadows.

Finally she realizes he's still rambling, talking about wanting to come see them. "I got Clem the next two weeks 'cause her mom's gonna be out of town, and we got some sort of crazy camp schedule -- don't do camp, these people never let up with their stupid projects, it's like Dharma on speed -- but we could come down if you -- " and she cuts him off.

"James. Whatever I was doing in California, I'm done with it now."

"Miami? You seen your sister yet? She all right?"

She closes her eyes, presses her fingers to her mouth. "Yes, James, she's all right. If it's OK with you, I think I'd rather just come up there. We're already on the West Coast and things with Rachel... well, let's just say it's been an adjustment."

"She not lettin' you cook your boar over a campfire anymore?"

"I have an iPhone 6. I didn't even know how to turn it on."

James laughs, just a little. "Hate them things. Damn tiny keyboards are ri-goddamn-diculous. ....Must be weird, though. Bein' back."

"Yeah, I figured you people would at least have flying cars by now."

"You ain't seen 'em yet?"

"Oh, so ten minutes and now you're outright mocking me." She pauses as Jonah gives her a death glare for being on the phone so long. "Listen, the boy is being quite the handful right now and I have to go entertain him for awhile or I'm going to pay the price. I'll call you with our flight information when I have it, OK?"

"OK. Juliet?"

"Yeah?"

"What's he like?"

She thinks. "Kind of like me."

"So he spends most of his time kickin' ass and takin' names? Punctuates it all with deadly stares and taser attacks?"

"Just try not to piss him off too much."

"I'll keep that in mind."

"Well, you do that." She finds herself smiling. Just a little smile. "Well ... I guess I'll see you soon."

"Guess you will."


	19. Three Questions

_"To look down on my own body and know that falling would mean dying not just once but many times. To fall for a million years like a flute falls, musically, played by the air it is passing through."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

**Text message, 8:16 a.m.**

_Hey it's j we're getting in around 2 but don't come to the airport, i'm not a fan of big airport scenes ok? just tell me your address and we'll find u _

* * *

James sits Clementine down to have a Big Important Conversation about Surprise Little Brother, tells her to clean her room and put new sheets on the other bunkbed and stop complaining about having to share her room, it's her brother and it's not forever. He runs a vacuum over the floors, throws the pile of shoes near the door into the nearest closet, dumps a pile of sheets and pillows over the couch in the upstairs den. Yells up to Clem, goes out for groceries.

When his hands are over the steering wheel he realizes how irritated he is. Six years and she can't even _call_ him this morning? She can't just _let him_ get them at the airport? She can't just let him do something, _anything_? And she goes and sends him a damn text message; he'd thought her technological skills were locked somewhere around 2001, but he guesses she's catching up, or maybe they had texting in 2001, he can't remember and that's beside the point anyway.

At 2:30 he sits down outside with a book he has no intention of reading. The house is at the top of a hill but the way the street curves, he hears cars long before he sees them.  
Which means it's somewhere on the far side of torture waiting, not doing anything, as usual.

After twenty minutes Clementine comes out in shorts and flip-flips, an ancient gray T-shirt, and sits down silently next to him. He pats the top of her foot. "Thanks, C," he mutters. Clementine shrugs.

After five more minutes he hears the grind of tires over gravel and half stands because he knows, he knows this is it. The car comes over the crest of the hill and he sees her features behind the windshield, her face locked into blankness, but she meets his eyes as she pulls into the driveway.

He approaches on shaky knees; she opens the car door, keys in hand, still totally expressionless. Couldn't she drop the poker face, just this once?

And then, she gives him a little half-smile, no longer meeting his eyes, but it's enough, it's what he needs, and he closes the gap between them and wraps her in a hug, wraps his arms around her and finds his right hand on the back of her neck, under her hair, and she's resting the side of her face on his shoulder and sags into him. She feels so right in his arms and it's unbelievable to think they've been apart twice as long as they were together, but something about the way she holds herself -- she's tense, defeated, and she's thinner, he noticed dark circles under her eyes and he wants to hold her tighter, but abruptly she pulls away and he sees her eyes are bright, too bright, and she's fighting for control.

She blinks and turns away, goes to the rear door and he follows her, motions to Clementine, who's still hovering around the house.

Juliet opens the door and unbuckles the boy in the booster seat. He really is so much like Jules -- Jonah has James' coloring, his nose maybe, but it's her blue eyes, her curling lips, and there's just something so _Jules_ in his expression that it just about breaks his damn heart.

He realizes no one's said anything this entire time, Clem is at his back and he takes a step backward and slides his arm around her shoulders.

Juliet smiles at Clem. "Hi Clementine, I'm Juliet. It's nice to meet you."

Clem nods. "Hey. Hi," she says awkwardly.

"This is Jonah," Juliet says. "Jonah, this is Clementine and James."

James bends down to see his son. Jonah's eyes are full of doubt, and James finds himself wondering exactly what Juliet's told him about his father, if anything. "Hey there. Hope you don't mind sharin' a bunk bed for awhile. Clem said you can have the top one."

Jonah twists up to look at his mother, who smiles encouragingly at him, so he turns around again and shakes his head at James. "What's a bunk bed?"

"Oh, you've never seen a bunk bed? Come on, we'll show you. It's fun. Just don't fall off when you're havin' a dream."

* * *

Juliet sits on the back deck watching James play with Jonah. There's a weathered wooden swing set in the back yard, left over from Clementine's younger days. She's trying to soak up the incredible sight before her, James and Jonah together, hitting it off better than she could have dreamed, but the truth is she's already so tired being here, it _hurts_ being here, makes her think of everything she's lost.

Something about the shaded backyard makes her think of John's backyard, which makes her think of the island, which makes her think of the terrible things she found herself doing, having done to her, getting tricked into doing. She starts thinking about the weapons she's held in her hands and once those thoughts get going, it can be hard to stop them.

James hasn't asked her any real questions in the two hours she's been here, and she hasn't volunteered anything. They've carefully talked around nearly everything important, chatting about the flight, her vast quantity of rented cars over the past two weeks, what the hell a GPS is. She saw him glance at the healing scar over her collarbone but he didn't say anything, and she silently cursed herself for not wearing something that covered it.

She really isn't in the mood for pity. Rachel pities her, wants to protect her. John doesn't pity her, he's beyond that sort of thing, and maybe that's why she felt like she could talk to him so freely. But James is clearly racked with guilt and wanting to do the right thing; she can see that from a mile away, but it doesn't make her feel better.

(She's not sure if she wants to feel better.)

This lounge chair is way too comfortable, and she knows she should get up but her eyelids are growing heavy and she doesn't feel like existing right now.

* * *

James sets up Clementine chopping veggies and gives Jonah forks and napkins to set the table. Juliet is still half-asleep out on the deck when he goes out to find her. She presses her left hand to her eyes for a moment and squints at him in the setting sun.

He sits on the edge of the lounge chair, at her feet. "Finally decided to rejoin the world?"

She stares at him for a moment.

He cringes. "Poor choice of words, huh?"

She nods and her expression softens some.

"Dinner's almost ready in there if you feel like eatin'," he says.

"James. Do you have two sets of memories? Locke said..."

"Yeah. Damnedest thing. I knew somethin' was off after the flight but I couldn't figure out what."

She's frowning slightly, her eyes dropped and off to the left, away from him. He knows she's thinking furiously. "And when was the last time you talked to Faraday?"

"Went to him 'bout findin' the bearings for the island. Didn't wanna help me though. Or couldn't. Said to talk to his mother, but that's all I'd been doin' in the first place."

"Did you talk to him about your two sets of memories?"

"Not really. Didn't seem that important at the time... Why?"

She's still frowning, squinting, thinking. "Because ... I have some memories I didn't have before."

_Well don't this beat all._ "What are you talkin' about?" he mutters.

She shakes her head, not quite looking at him. "Nothing major. Just little things -- details, conversations -- that I know didn't happen, before."

"On the island?"

She nods.

"But how's that even possible?"

She draws her knees up to her chest, her fingers on her lips. He gets the distinct feeling that she knows a lot more than she's letting on. Finally she shakes her head. "It doesn't matter right now. Let's go inside."

He doesn't press her. He stands, and helps her up.

Dinner is delightfully, unexpectedly noisy. There's roughly six years between Clementine and Jonah, but they've got each other fired up and Clem's already figured out how to make him squeal with laughter. Meanwhile, Clem is trying to tell James about her play rehearsals at day camp and Jonah's swinging his legs under the table and swatting at her hand for more attention.

Juliet is fairly quiet throughout all this. But she looks happy. And James is just trying to soak up as much of this moment as he possibly can.

* * *

Juliet puts Jonah to bed and Clem is in the basement practicing clarinet and sneakily texting her friends.

James is out on the deck with his hand around the neck of a beer bottle. Juliet shuts the door behind her quietly and pads out to the edge of the deck, where James has an arm draped over the railing.

"What, no Dharma beer?"

"Sorry 'bout that. Fresh out. Sub's comin' tomorrow, though."

She smiles and shivers a little.

"You cold?"

"Not used to anything colder than semi-tropical."

"You wanna go inside?"

"Not really."

They stand looking out at the yard. She's different than he'd remembered. Sadder. He wonders about the things she's seen, the people she's known, things that have happened to her. How she managed with Jonah. Who looked out for them. If anyone did. How she ever survived that fall. He wants to know, and then he doesn't. He supposes maybe it's like the part of him that had hoped she really was dead.

When she starts to speak, it takes him a moment to even hear her, and when he realizes what she's saying, it's like she's reading his mind.

"I'll answer three questions for you tonight," she says into the darkness. "Your choice." She moves and sits down at the top of the stairs leading down into the yard, looks up at him as an invitation.

He moves down and sits next to her. She reaches for his beer, which he hands to her. She takes a sip and gives it back.

"Just three?"

"Three's enough for tonight."

His brain tries to travel in a thousand directions at once, but the question that comes to his lips isn't once he'd even consciously considered. "Did you know you were pregnant? Before...?"

She reaches for the beer in his hand without looking, takes another sip, stares out toward the treeline. He's forgotten how long she can go without blinking. "Yes."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Is that your second question?"

"I should think it's part of the first."

"Maybe you shouldn't ask closed-ended questions then," she says, smiling slightly, and takes another sip. She tilts her head, looking at the bottle. "You got any more of these?"

"Hang on." He stands, runs into the house, finds two bottles and the bottle opener. She hasn't moved an inch since he's been gone. He opens a bottle and hands it to her; he realizes she's finished the first, so he opens the other beer in his hand and sits down again. Doesn't say anything.

Finally she says, "I found out a few hours before I delivered Amy's baby."

The day before everything went to hell. "I guess I can't really fault ya for not tellin' me," he mutters.

She shows no reaction. It's like they're playing poker instead of having the first face-to-face conversation in six years. He suddenly wants to scream in her face just to see if she's really awake. That's when she turns to look at him. "Second question?"

He thinks, looking at her beautiful sad face, thinking of her that night on the dock, the first time he (almost) made her laugh. This is going to be a hard question to ask, and a harder answer to hear. "What happened after -- the bomb?"

She's been about to take a sip of her beer and instead she lowers the bottle, runs her finger around the rim. She looks at him for a long time, like she's trying to decide whether to cross a boundary or run away from it. Finally she closes her eyes for a moment. Stands. Turns around. Lifts the back of her shirt.

Her mark is solid black, like it had been burned in with charcoal.

Before it can barely register in his brain, she's dropped her shirt and sat back down. He twists his face in the absence of understanding. "What the -- "

She's not looking at him again. "When you and Kate took Ben to Richard -- it wasn't what happened to me. Or maybe it was, I guess. I don't know. You know I told you about Jacob. There's another side of him. His brother. I never told you about that. I didn't want to. But. I don't know. I was in the jungle. Maybe I was blasted out of the hole like Desmond out of the hatch. Ben came. He made some kind of bargain. It wasn't -- it -- he --" She presses her eyes shut, trying to regain her composure.

"Ben," James growls before he can help it.

"James. Don't."

"What did that bug-eyed bastard -- "

"James. Please. I don't know what he did, exactly, but he wasn't working for Jacob anymore. I don't know why, or what happened, or when that started. But I didn't die."

If his beer bottle were a person, that person would have been strangled by now, purple in the face and long past pleading for mercy. "Where is the sonuvabitch now?"

"Do you really want that to be your third question?"

"Do I get three more tomorrow?"

"Sure."

"Then yeah."

She stands. "Ben's dead. I'm going to go to sleep."


	20. Nickname Czar

**Thanks so much to everyone for your encouraging reviews! They make me so happy! Plus, I've pretty much kicked the swine flu, which also makes me happy. w00t!**

**I've gotten a couple questions about where we are in the story, so I thought I'd let you all know we're probably about halfway. My outline has gotten longer, and there's still a lot of island backstory, plus the stuff in the present, which will shortly get more complicated. Of course, right? And this chapter ended up longer than I'd planned, so you'll have to tune in again soon for the next "three questions."**

* * *

_"This was before I knew anything about anything, for instance that all human movement is in slow motion compared to how fast you can move if you are just a glowing darkness."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

Juliet awakes slowly, in stages, aware of something small and warm pressed against her back. She can't remember where she is at first and then she remembers she's in James' bed, he'd insisted on taking the couch in the upstairs den, and she turns her head over her shoulder to see a small black cat pressed against her. The thing is purring like a chainsaw, and it's shedding fucking _everywhere_, and she groans and gets out of bed, her feet instantly cold on the floor. She picks up the cat, who's obviously the most passive cat in the history of the world because it just sort of hangs there with its limbs drooping lazily.

The door is cracked already, that's how this sneaky creature broke in, and Juliet moves to pitch the cat into the hall. As she hooks her ankle around the door to open it, she sees James coming out from the den at the other end of the hall. She drops the cat, who gives her a dirty look and slinks toward James, disappearing into the other room.

"See ya had a little visitor," James says, grinning.

She shrugs. "We met in the bar; it was all a haze. I'm not entirely convinced anything happened."

He raises his eyebrows suggestively. "Never knew you were into chicks."

Juliet starts to laugh, trying to cover her mouth, she suddenly can't help it, this laughter from nowhere, and it's way too early to laugh like this but it feels good. There's sun coming into the hall from the big windows in the den and up from the downstairs like the whole house is glowing. "What's her name?"

"That ain't relevant."

"What? What's her name?"

James looks sheepish. "Cat."

"Cat. Cat?!" Juliet doesn't even know where to go with this delightful piece of information. "You're telling me that the fucking _czar_ of all nicknames on Craphole Island has a cat named Cat."

"Hey, listen, it wasn't on purpose, she started hangin' around, I fed her a couple times an' she wouldn't never leave."

"A likely story."

"Were you actually gettin' up or were you just pitchin' my precious bundle of fur out into the big bad world?"

"I don't know, what time is it?"

"'Bout 6:30?"

"Ugh. Well, guess I'm awake now."

He gestures toward the stairs. "Ladies first."

Juliet thinks of the sub, July '77. That last chance. _Ladies first._

But she takes the stairs, glad he can't see the subtle blush spreading over her face. When she'd bent down with the cat, she could have sworn he'd darted his eyes away from the gap in her tank top.

The first floor is soaked with early-morning sun and she realizes she likes this house, its wide-plank floors and dark trim and white-washed walls. The whole thing is horrendously old and creaky, not the sort of place she could have imagined James living in before, but it's comfortable and dusty and beautiful in its own way.

In the kitchen, she runs her hand under her hair, across the back of her neck. James sees her out of the corner of his eyes and fishes a thick blue rubber band out of the drawer next to the fridge. "Need this?" he asks, reaching out to hand it to her, and she shakes her head in disbelief that after all these years, he still recognizes when she wants to put up her hair.

"Thanks," she murmurs.

"Coffee?"

"God yes."

"You still like it in Heart Attack City?"

"Obviously."

"I'm gonna be twitchin' all day, you realize."

"Tough."

He starts making the coffee and she sits at the table, watches him mess with the complicated-looking digital display. Wonders if she could even manage to make coffee in this kitchen. "So, look," he says, while measuring out a what's essentially a metric ton of coffee grounds. "I took the next few days off but I'm going to have to drop by this morning real quick and sort some stuff out with the schedule. Gonna drop Clem at camp first, but I'll be back by 10, 11 at the latest."

"What do you do, anyway?"

He looks embarrassed, for the second time this morning, and it's not even 7 yet. "I'm a prison librarian."

She laughs. (For the second time this morning, and it's not even 7 yet.) "You're kidding."

"Nope. Figured I knew what it's like to have a limited amount of reading material in an isolated community."

"I'll say."

"Got my M.L.S. an' everything."

She smiles. "That's wonderful, James."

"Yeah. It's been pretty good, all things considered." He shrugs. "The guys are a damn pain in the ass sometimes, but I know what it's like to be on the other side, after all."

"At least they let you back out at night."

"Usually." The coffee's ready, and he pours it into large green mugs. He hands one to her, black, and goes to the refrigerator for milk for his.

She cups her mug in both hands. Closes her eyes. Breathes in the smell of the ridiculously strong coffee, steam floating up to warm her face. And it's the simplest thing, really, but for some reason she can't think of anything more she could want, right in this tiny little moment.

------ FLASHBACK (1921) ------

Goddamn but she needed to get laid. She hated to think about it in those terms, it seemed so crude, but it had been _a year and a half_ and she was starting to look at Nicholas like he was a piece of meat. He had been so good to her, really, and sweet with the baby. He looked out for her, listened to her. Alice was encouraging her like crazy to just stop thinking about things so much.

"Honestly, Jules. He's over the moon for you." Alice smiled at her as she sliced a mango, licked the edge of the knife.

Juliet took her half and sat down at the table, Jonah in the sling draped across her shoulder. "That's the problem."

"You're being completely bloody ridiculous!"

"Alice. Don't get all English on me now. I don't want to hurt him. I just don't think I feel the same way."

"Number one, I _am_ English. And number two, how will you know unless you try?" Alice's smile started off innocent and slowly turned anything but.

"Number one, I want you to know that you're an absolutely terrible influence. Number two, in case you haven't noticed, I'm not exactly in an ideal situation for that sort of thing."

"What, the baby?"

"Yes, the baby!"

Alice nibbled a piece of mango delicately. "I would think he's old enough to spend a night with his auntie every now and then."

Juliet took Alice's knife and concentrated very carefully on slicing her share of mango into eight completely equal slices. "I know how old my son is, thank you."

Alice watched, drumming her fingers on the table. "Are you planning on eating that mango, or dissecting it?"

"It's my mango, and I'll do with it as I please," Juliet said primly.

"I think I should take the baby tomorrow night."

Juliet opened her mouth to protest, and Alice held up her hands. "Maybe you just need to get a good night's sleep," she said, smirking.

Juliet stared at the table. "Maybe," she said lightly.

* * *

Nicholas was sitting at a fire at the edge of the camp, cleaning guns. _How romantic. _She sat down next to him._ This is pathetic._

He looked up and smiled through the darkness. "Where's the baby?"

"Alice has him. For the night. You need help?"

"Just finishing up."

"Oh," she said in a small voice.

"You want to take a walk up to the creek?"

She looked into the fire and tried to make her past seem extremely small and dim and far away. "Yeah."

They were within sight of the creek when she turned to him, just a half of a turn, really, and lifted her chin. He granted her a half smile, his eyes widening slightly. "Could we just not talk for a little while?" she muttered.

"You know you didn't need to fake a walk for that, right?" he said before he cupped her face with his hands and kissed her. She pressed into him, a little more eagerly than she'd planned, but god, it had been _so_ long and she'd forgotten how good kissing felt, and his mouth tasted so good, she just wanted to drop into this, into someone that cared about her, and maybe that was enough and maybe she could end up feeling something for him too, and if not, Goodwin wasn't so bad, that was sex and comfort and companionship, and it didn't matter it wasn't about love and maybe this wouldn't either. And then his hands were up her shirt and her mind ceased all rational thought.

Afterward they lay on the ground, still partially dressed and decidedly sweaty. "You want to try that again indoors later?" he said when he'd caught his breath, lacing his fingers through hers.

The dark hid her smile, her mind blissfully blank.

------ END FLASHBACK ------

James goes upstairs to wake Clementine for camp, and Juliet shuffles through the morning newspaper. There'd been a multi-year global recession, not to mention the market crashes right after she'd left in 2001. Fortunately, she'd given Rachel power of attorney for her so-called six-month stint with Mittelos, and her bank account had been sitting pretty much untouched since then. There hadn't been a ton in there, sure she'd been a subspecialist in her field, but the divorce had pretty much crippled her finances and she'd still been paying off med school loans anyway.

But she'd had Rachel transfer the Juliet Burke money into a new account before she'd left on this latest jaunt. And Juliet had closed out that fucking Bank of Richard account and transferred those funds, too. She had the phone company change her number and billing account, too. She didn't know if anyone really was going to look for her, especially under her fake name. And she figured Richard wouldn't need her or he wouldn't have let her go in the first place, but she might as well tie up as many loose ends as possible.

The truth is, the further she seems to get from that whole mess, the more it seems like it was just some really long bad dream. At least until she got another one of those headaches, anyway.

She's a little worried about her new memories, though. They were so minor, so inconsequential, really. Seeing a cluster of white butterflies in the North Valley. Telling Dottie about something her mother had done. But she's convinced that they'd happened in some other iteration (or iterations, plural?) of her time there. That day she and Alice had cut their hair, for instance. She's sure that initially, they'd tossed their hair into the ocean. But there's a not-entirely opaque layer over that memory, and she knows they'd scattered it for birds to use for nests.

There's a realization slowly hovering around her consciousness about what this could end up meaning.

And anyway, she really didn't want to keep thinking about Alice.

She really, _really_ needs to stop thinking about Alice.

So she folds up the newspaper and finishes her coffee and wills her mind to go perfectly blank, as blank as her fucking perfect poker face.

* * *

James parks his fake Dharma Jeep behind Juliet's rental car, glad he's back at least before 10:30. He finds Juliet out on the deck with a book, Jonah messing around with an old, small bike of Clementine's on the grass.

"Hey!" James barks from the door.

They both look up at him, confused.

"You need a helmet on that noggin, buddy boy, I don't care if you're only on the grass."

Juliet winces. "James, I'm sorry. I didn't even think about that."

"Well, you _gotta_ be thinkin' about that! Jesus, what if something happened and -- "

She lets out a single syllable of a frustrated laugh. "What if something _happened_? Where the hell do you think we just came from, James?"

Well shit, why did he have to go off on her like that? Of course she'd had to protect little J from far worse than falling on a patch of grass. And she's staring at him with a icy glare like he hadn't seen in six years, or maybe thirty-six._ Shit._

He looks at her, takes a step back. "Jules, I'm sorry. I didn't mean -- "

She shakes her head quickly, looking apologetic. "It's OK, James. I'm sorry, I'm just -- not used to the way things are here."

"Listen, why don't you hang out here, just relax, an' I'll take the kid down to the Target and get him a helmet and he can practice his crash landings to his heart's content?"

Her expression softens some. "God, I missed Target."

"Y'wanna come?"

"Nah. Too weird. All that stuff, just right there? Not six months 'til the next sub?" She rolls her eyes. "Go. Have fun. I'll be here."

Jonah's been watching them, concerned, his gaze bouncing between them like he's watching a damned tennis match.

"C'mon, shortstack, we're gonna go on a trip," he says. "Hey Jules, where are your car keys?"

She tilts her head, not following.

"The kid's got a booster seat, right?"

She smirks. "Yes he has a booster seat. Trust me, I had a very anxious rental agent back in Florida. Keys are on the counter. I'm sorry I got angry."

"You don't got nothin' to be sorry about."

* * *

Juliet watches the car back down the driveway, watches as they disappear down the hill.

"Yes I do," she says into the breeze.


	21. Shotgun Shack

_"All of the darkness was inside me, and I could feel it flowing, like the volume of music when it shows you how to move."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

They stop for ice cream on the way back from Target, and James remembers to grab a huge stack of napkins because he remembers the messy-eating-of-melty-ice-cream-cones all too well. They sit on a bench outside and Jonah is furrowing his eyebrows like he's thinking hard while eating his ice cream.

"You got a question, kiddo?"

Jonah thinks some more. "Are you my father?"

Well, he sure gets to the point quick. "What'd your mom tell ya?"

"Yes."

"So, there ya go. Yeah, buddy, I'm your dad."

"You were on the island?"

"Uh... Yeah, for a few years."

"And you lived in the yellow house with Mama, but you didn't know about me."

James raises his eyebrows. The kid is smart. "Yep. Wish I had, though. I'm glad you're here now, you know that?"

"Did you ever see the black smoke?"

"Uh... yeah."

"Oh." Jonah pauses to take a bite of ice cream. "This one time, me and Mama were going to the creek, to play with boats? And the black smoke came, and she picked me up and ran really, really fast. And we hid in this underground thing but then the smoke came in anyway. And Mama covered up my eyes with her hand 'cause the smoke? It was _looking_ at us. But then it went away and then we didn't even go to the creek. We went back home and read stories. But she let me stay up late. I remember."

_Holy shit._ "That sounds like it was scary."

Jonah shrugs and takes another bite. "A little. Ow!" He puts his hand to his head. "OW!"

James panics, reaching out for Jonah's arm. "Hey! You OK? What's the matter?"

"It HURTS!" he yells.

James thinks for a second. "Does your head feel really, really cold?"

"Yeah!" he says.

James rubs Jonah's forehead. "Startin' to get better now?"

"Yeah," Jonah whimpers.

"Listen, kiddo, you gotta eat your ice cream slower, OK? You just got your first ice cream headache."

* * *

Juliet paces the house. She feels awful about blowing up at James. Here he is, the one responsible parent around, and she yells at him for actually trying to protect Jonah. She doesn't know what to do with herself (other than feel guilty), but she remembers James' basement bookshelves and goes downstairs to distract herself.

She pulls on the overhead lamp and can't resist a smile. Two entire walls are covered in floor-to-ceiling shelves, and judging from the rest of the house, she knows this is just the overflow. There's an old stereo on an end table, and she looks through his CDs and finds a Talking Heads album, puts it on. The music calms her down a lot, and the coffee is keeping her awake, and things feel a little bit better now.

_You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack, you may find yourself in another part of the world._

Oh, this is just so perfect. She (almost) laughs.

Onto the books. The reading material on the island during her last six years was classics at best, odd and sporadic at worst. She and Alice read a lot of months-old (decades-old) fashion magazines. She pulls out a couple of novels by an author she'd liked before time went kind of insane for her.

The cat suddenly brushes against her leg and as Juliet moves to look at her, another book catches her eye. Carrie. She reaches for it. Pauses to pet the attention-demanding cat. She hasn't read this book in so long. Sad, since she'd even had a first edition back in Dharmaville. She flips it open, tells herself she'll just read a few lines before moving on to the new novels she'd pulled.

But something flutters to the floor. It freaks the hell out of Cat, too, who hisses and backs away.

"Guess you're not fond of surprises," she tells Cat. Juliet bends down to pick up the slip of paper -- actually, it's a photograph, fallen face down. She turns it over and it's -- her. Just her. It's her from the Missing posters, the photo that was splashed over the Internet. She turns it over again, looks at the watermark on the back. Hewlett-Packard. Printed at home, probably.

She flips it over again, looks at her shy smile. Maybe this was the only photo of her that James had. He'd printed it out, hidden it in this book.

And if she'd really turned out to be dead, that would probably have been the best memorial she could have ever wanted. Hidden in a basement, pressed between the pages of her favorite book, by someone who really, truly knew her once a upon a time.

The same song is still on: _Time isn't holding us, time isn't after us, time isn't holding us, time isn't holding us._

She realizes now she hasn't really thought about James' side of this. Yeah, his guilt bothered her, made her uncomfortable. Made her feel worse, frankly. She doesn't really think of herself as someone worthy of pity, considering. But here she'd been drowning in all these bottled-up emotions, not thinking about what he'd been through one goddamn bit. She sits, shuts her eyes, draws her knees up.

"Mrow?" Cat says.

Juliet opens her eyes. _Oh, come on. _"What do you want?"

Cat rubs up against her leg. Droops down, rolls her head over the top of Juliet's foot.

"Yeah, yeah," Juliet mutters, and pets the cat. Smiles instead of cries. It's not so bad.

* * *

Juliet is still sitting on the cold basement floor reading Carrie -- with Cat sacked out on the floor next to her -- when she hears footsteps above.

"Jules?" James calls.

"Be right there," she calls back. Jumps up, sticks her photo back into the book, replaces it on the shelf. Picks up the two books she'd selected earlier, goes upstairs.

James is taking a new red bike helmet out of a box. Jonah is wearing most of an ice cream cone on his shirt.

James nods at her. "Communing with the mildew?"

Juliet holds up the books. "Foraging for 21st-century reading material."

James looks like he wants to say something, and doesn't. Nods at Jonah. "Sorry he got a little messed up. Experienced his first brainfreeze, though."

"Yeah, the Good Humor man never could find the island," she says. "I'm sorry about before, James."

"I told ya, it's OK -- "

"No, James. I'm sorry. As in, really sorry, all right?" She doesn't want this to turn into a Big Scene, though.

He looks at her. "Hey little J, would you mind goin' down to play in the basement for a little bit? You seen that big box of Legos down there, right?"

Jonah hops from one foot to another. "How many minutes until I can ride my bike?"

Juliet and James keep their eyes locked. "Ten," they say in unison.

* * *

"You wanna tell me what's goin' on?" he says.

She breaks eye contact first, sits, playing with the straps of Jonah's helmet. "I just -- I haven't really been thinking about what it must be like for you."

"What are you talkin' about?" He's still standing.

"Just -- having us barge in here, and..." She trails off, staring at the table. "I'm just sorry for being so strange and -- " She presses her hands to her eyes. "I just -- I don't know what to do. I don't know what I'm supposed to be _doing_. I don't know how to talk to you about -- " She blinks, and a tear runs down her cheek.

James sits. Touches her elbow. "Jules. You know you can talk to me, right? And if you don't want to, I can wait, OK? I'm not tryin' to make you cry here."

"It's not you. It's just -- so strange, being back. I really thought I'd be there forever. I'd even come to a point where... I mean, I know it sounds incredibly messed up, but I'd just sort of accepted it."

"We accepted it back in Dharmaville."

"Yeah. But -- we were happy, you know?"

"Yeah. I do."

She presses her lips together, still not meeting his eyes.

"How 'bout if I ask you three real easy questions that probably won't make you cry?"

"That might be OK."

"All right. Here goes. What was Jonah like as a baby?"

She looks at him, smiles. A real, genuine smile, maybe the first he's seen since she showed up almost 24 hours ago. "Oh God, James, he was so cute. He was practically bald until he was 18 months old. He was up all night, every night. I think I had more sleep when I was an intern. And he conked every morning right when the sun came up, so I'd try to sleep then, too. I barely saw daylight for six months. And once he started grabbing for things, I spent the next six months pulling my hair out of his hands. Let's see... He first walked the week after he turned one. Down near the creek. His first word was 'ma,' which of course I liked."

"Of course."

"James. If I could have changed things -- so that I never went to the island -- I mean, I wouldn't have. If it meant I hadn't had him. I'm glad the reset didn't work on me."

He nods. "You don't have any pictures, do you?"

Juliet grins again. "Only three, believe it or not, but yeah." She reaches for her tote bag, which was hanging from the chair at the head of the table. She pulls out a big manila folder, dumps out its contents -- passports, paperwork. There's a smaller white envelope. "Here."

Inside the envelope are three slightly fuzzy, yellow-toned black-and-white photographs. James lets out a low whistle. "This is kinda weird."

"Weirder than being in the Dharma Initiative and having monthly meetings with an immortal?"

"Possibly." He looks more closely at the pictures -- two of Jonah as a chubby bald baby, and then one of Juliet and Jonah together, when Little J was around two or three. Jonah's in a buttoned-down shirt, Juliet's half-smiling, wearing a light-colored dress. Her hair is cut to her chin in a wavy bob. "Nice hair."

Her laugh is a single note. "Shut up."

"No, I mean it, it looked good on ya. But it's one thing to hear about you bein' back there..."

"And another thing to see it."

"Well, yeah."

Juliet points at one of the baby pictures. "This one, he was cutting his first tooth. The only minute of the entire day he stopped screaming, right there."

"Lucky me."

"Indeed. Well, I can make some copies of these for you if you want."

He doesn't want to think about what it means that she'd make copies for him, that she could just be going back to Miami after making those copies. "That mean you're willin' to go to Target one of these days?"

"Probably. OK, third question."

"Hmm. OK, why'd you cut your hair?"

"Seriously, _that's _your third question?"

"Tryin' not to make you cry here."

"And yet you can look at that picture, and think that that haircut _didn't _make me cry?"

"I told ya, I think it looked good."

"We were bored."

"Bored."

"There was nothing to do, it was rainy season. We had all these fashion magazines that Alice had had shipped from London, we were bored, stuck inside, a little silly, and -- " She shrugged.

"Who's Alice?"

"Ah, but that would be four questions."

"Thanks, Count."

"Hmm. Is Jonah too old for Sesame Street?"

"Kid ain't seen much TV, huh?"

"Not really. He's only had six days at Rachel's and she's one of those anti-TV moms, anyway."

"I think he should be OK. So, Alice. She your friend?"

"She -- _was_." Juliet's face contorts and she's crying, _really_ crying, hard and without warning. She throws her hand to cover her face but it's clear she's panicking, breathing too quickly, can't get the sobs out fast enough to breathe and cry at the same time.

"Hey hey hey," he said softly.

She shakes her head, trying futilely to regain control. "I'm sorry -- " she chokes out, gasping for air.

"Listen, you wanna cry, it's OK. Go ahead and cry."

She presses both hands to her eyes and lets out a wail that makes his blood run cold. Without thinking about it, he wraps his arms around her, and he's surprised when she snakes her arms under his and wraps them around his back, and finally gives up and just lets herself cry.


	22. Bad Hair and a Lot of Mangos

_"But, like ivy, we grow where there is room for us."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

Eventually, somehow, she stops sobbing, remembers how to breathe. She is still hunkered down in James' arms, her head tucked under his chin, her eyes closed. Belatedly she realizes his shirt is wet with her tears, and she disentangles herself, looks up at him, bashful. "Um. Sorry," she mumbles. _God, this is embarrassing._

"What, you think I didn't get cried on for four months straight with the Doc?"

Juliet chokes and laughs, wiping the tears from her face. "Thank you. I think I needed that." Her stomach is still in knots. She notices the kitchen floor needs to be mopped.

"The laughing or the crying?"

"I don't know. Both, I think."

"Feel better?"

She looks at his concerned face, his scrunched-up eyebrows. "Strangely enough, yeah."

"You talked to Rachel lately?"

She bites her lips, shakes her head. "Not since Monday."

"_Monday?_ Jeez, Juliet."

"I know." Juliet looks away for a moment, out the window into the backyard, then looks back. "Her fiance -- Brian? He's sort of suspicious of me, I think. I was -- a little crazy when I was there. Or, I still am I little crazy, maybe. And Rachel's just weirded out, I guess. Did I tell you I have a fake identity?"

"Uh ... What?"

She shakes her head, smirking. "Yep. Picked my own first name at least, but I'm Leah C. Tobin on paper. And I'm more than a year younger now, which is sort of nice. But I have everything I needed to sneak back into the normal world. Well, except for a medical degree."

James frowns.

Juliet shrugs, trying not to think too much about that part for right now. "Well, anyway, Richard got the rest of it for me. Wasn't that sweet of him?" she says dryly.

"Richard... Alpert?"

"The man never ages, what'd you expect?"

"I dunno. I just never thought 'bout you livin' there with him."

"The weirdest part? _He'd _never met _me_ before."

"Yeah, that is pretty weird. Makes sense, though."

"Even better? He was terrified of me for the first couple of years." She tries out her best evil grin, arches her eyebrow. "It was actually a little fun."

"So, let's see." (She can tell James is trying to keep this light.) "You got to play mind games with Richard, eat a lot of mangos, take bad haircut pictures..."

"Oddly enough, some of it was OK, yeah, if that's what you were aiming at. There was a lot of time to kill. A lot more than I'd ever had before, on the island. There was a creepy Other militia thing going, but -- a lot of them were weirdly normal. I guess I was sort of their doctor. We'd cooked up this whole cover story I was a nurse, because of the times, I guess, but it ended up not really mattering because -- well, maybe that's another story," she finishes as she hears Jonah stomping up the basement steps.

"Is it time yet?" Jonah is on the verge of whining.

"Yeah, OK," James says, not taking his eyes from Juliet. "Listen, why dontcha go upstairs, wash your face, call your sister? When you're done maybe you can bring Little J down a shirt that's actually clean."

"Sounds like a plan."

She realizes when she's on the stairs that she's still sort of smiling.

------ FLASHBACK (1921) ------

Alice flashed her a devilish grin as she opened the door for Juliet. "_So?_"

"_So_, it was very nice having an evening off. Thank you. Now give me my child before you totally corrupt him, too."

Alice let off a devilish cackle, did a little dance. "I knew it, I knew it, I knew it!" She tilted her chin up, beaming.

"Shut up. Seriously, shut up or I will kill you."

"Oh, no you won't, love."

Juliet rolled her eyes and picked up Jonah, who babbled at her and instantly tangled his hand in Juliet's hair. "Ow, quit it, buddy -- " She started pulling her hair out of his grasp.

Alice inspected her appearance in the small mirror on the wall. "Can I ask you a personal question?"

"Um ... Not if it's about last night, no."

"It's not that."

"Then fine." Juliet sat on the edge of Alice's bed with the baby in her arms.

Alice turned from the mirror. "When are you coming from, anyway?"

Juliet thought she had to be mishearing her. "Uh... Excuse me?"

"Oh, come off it. I'm only coming from five years out, so it's not that odd for me."

"_What?_"

Alice smirked. "Jules. Really, you thought you were the only one?"

"Um."

"Listen, you know I'm 26, right? Did you also know that in London right now, there's another one of me who's only 21?" Alice arched her eyebrow.

Juliet tried not to laugh, pressing her hand hard against her mouth.

"You really did! You really thought you were different, didn't you?" Alice crowed. "Oh, Jules, _really_!"

Juliet felt somewhere between amused and shocked nearly speechless. "Um... I guess I should probably be in two thousand.... nine? I'm not positive because I came from somewhere else first."

"2009, really?" Alice gave her an impressed look. "Bloody hell, Jules, maybe you are something after all. No one else is that far out."

"No one _else_?" Juliet gave her a look that could only be described as crazy.

"What. Did. I. Just. Tell. You?" Alice was shaking her head, looking at her like she was stupid, something to be pitied. "Oh Juliet, we should have had this talk a long time ago."

Juliet continued her crazy look. "This. Is really. Really weird."

"Oh really, like you think_ this_ is the weirdest thing that ever happened to you? Did you know Richard, when you were coming from?"

"Uh. Yeah."

Alice raised her eyebrows, impressed. "Huh. Not bad. So, I should probably warn you that this while this is sort of an open secret -- most of us don't really talk about it much. It can get a bit strange."

Jonah squirmed to get down, and Juliet put him on the bed, kept a hand on him so he wouldn't crawl off the edge. "Is it -- like -- everyone?"

"Well, not quite half of us here. That other camp we have? There's a lot more travelers in that mix."

"Nicholas -- "

"Coming from 1947. Massachusetts, I think. Did you know he fought in Japan?"

"Uh... Obviously not. Christopher?"

"Nope, he's in time. Born here."

"Dottie?"

"From '64. Born here, though. And what makes it better is this _still_ isn't the weirdest thing that's ever happened to you, is it?" Alice flashed her a delighted grin.

Juliet couldn't quite recall how to form a coherent sentence. Finally she managed, "In the top ten."

------ END FLASHBACK ------

She has four missed calls on her phone from Rachel. She ignores the voicemails, sits on the floor of James' bedroom with her knees bent, her back against the door like someone could barge in on her at any second. Holds her breath for a few seconds, dials.

"Where the hell are you?!"

"Hi to you, too," Juliet says.

Rachel's voice bounces from angry to concerned. "Juliet, are you all right? Is Jonah OK? Where -- "

"Rachel, we're fine. We're in Oregon. With James. Jonah's father."

"What? Wow. So that guy you went to see, he helped you find him?"

"Uh... Sort of. It's kind of a long story. But yeah, John referred me to someone who was in touch with James."

"Someone else from the island." Rachel is sounding skeptical again.

"Yes."

"Listen, Jules, don't you think maybe we should get in touch with the detectives who'd been working on your disappearance? Because -- "

"Rachel. They're never going to believe me. They'll never be able to find the island. Trust me."

"I really want to trust you, Juliet. But are you sure you're just not -- I mean, maybe you _think_ there was an island or something, and you just got... sort of confused?"

Juliet shoots to her feet. "Oh, so _that's _what this is about?" she yells. "You think I'm _crazy_? HOLD on!" She thunders downstairs, fueled by her sudden anger. Storms into the backyard, slamming the door behind her. "James!" she barks.

James looks up from helping Jonah on the bike, both of them startled. "Will you PLEASE tell my sister that I'm not freaking insane and there really IS an island?" she yells so Rachel can hear her even though she's already holding the phone out to James.

James gives her a look along the lines of _you can't be serious_.

"Just do your best," she mutters.

He takes the phone gingerly. "Uh, hello? ... Yeah, this is James. ...Ford. Ya want my social security number, too? ...Yeah, we met on the island. ...Me? My plane crashed there. ...No, she'd already been there three years. ...Mittelos. ...Yeah. ...Yeah. ...Head of security. ...Six years ago. ...I'm a librarian. ...No, definitely not. ...OK." He looks up at her, hands her the phone. "Here."

Juliet snatches it back. "OK?!" she yells into the phone, and hurls it to the ground.

* * *

**Reviews make the world go 'round, people!  
**


	23. Running

**Thank you so much for all your awesome reviews! I love hearing all your different opinions and theories! Haven't gotten around organically yet to "James shirtless," but I'll see what I can do. I do want to remind you all, though, that this is just a story and there are no pictures, unfortunately.**

* * *

_"I pressed my lips against his ear and whispered again, it's not your fault. Perhaps this was really the only thing I had ever wanted to say to anyone, and be told."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories" -

* * *

"That ... didn't exactly go like I'd hoped," she says, still shaking in anger.

"Ya think?" James reaches down and retrieves her phone from the ground.

"Is it broken?" she asks hopefully.

James switches it on. "Nope. Just threw it on the grass, after all. Think your mean right hook's suffered some in the meantime."

She tries to stop shaking, offers a smirk. "Yeah, you wanna test that theory, buster?"

"Hey, no violence in front of the kid." They pause to watch Jonah, who's abandoned his weird yelling mother and is trying the bike along the back fence.

"This is all a lot harder than I'd thought."

"What, you were thinkin' it'd be a snap?"

She shakes her head. "I disappear for twelve years, she thinks I'm dead, I show up with a kid for six days and then I disappear again, don't answer her phone calls. Then I call her to yell at her."

James shrugs. "So call her back."

"What, you got an answer for everything now just 'cause you're a librarian?"

James breaks out into a grin that she can't quite bring herself to return despite her snappy comeback. "Hey, I had an answer for everything way before that," he says, but she knows he's watching the war on her face, and finally she manages, for once, to say what she feels.

"Listen. I'm really angry right now and I don't know what to do. Would you mind staying here with Jonah for awhile so I can talk a walk?"

"You're not just gonna go to Target without me, are ya?"

"Probably not."

"Good 'cause it's about six miles away."

"What, you think I'm not up for a hike considering where I just came from?" And there, a smile stretches unexpectedly over her face. "OK. I feel crazy. I'm going now. I'll be back as soon as I can. An hour or so, all right?"

"Hey, take your time. The kid and I'll kick back, shoot the shit, have a few beers and talk about women."

"Oh, yeah. He and I used to do that all the time."

James nods his head once quickly, flashes her an evil grin. "Figures."

"What, you think I'm joking?" she says. Looks up at her son, holding the fence with one hand and the handlebars with the other. "Hey, buddy?" she calls. Jonah looks up warily. "I'm going to go out for a little bit. Is it OK if you stay here with James?"

"Uh huh."

She pauses, then finds her feet moving. She jogs over to the fence, leans down, and kisses him on the forehead. "Have fun. I'm sorry you saw me yelling. That wasn't very nice of me. When you're grown up, you can yell at me for it, OK?"

"Two chapters tonight?"

Jeez, he must have learned his powers of manipulation from Ben's people. She swallows her smile. "Maybe. Let's see later, OK?"

* * *

When her feet find the sidewalk out front, she finds herself running before she even realizes it. The world is splintered into a million billion colors right now, and she knows it's not sustainable, she knows at this rate, she'll explode and burn out on emotion like a supernova.

Her legs are pounding now, she feels like she's flying down the hill, nearly tripping she's going so fast, and her hair streams out behind her and she can't run fast enough right now to stop thinking. And how strange it is now, to be here, in the real world, having hugged Rachel, seen her, laughed and cried with her. Seeing James now. How he held her when she'd cried.

But then her mind shifts again and she's thinking about the two people she finds herself missing most -- now.

------ FLASHBACK (1923) ------

"Cat."

"Good, buddy. I'll say -- coconut." Juliet was rolling bandages in the corner of the cabin where she stored medical supplies. Rain pounded on the roof, providing a sort of comforting white noise in the absence of a stereo. Which would have been pretty fucking awesome to have every now and then, if she wanted to be realistic about it.

"Kiss."

"Nope, that's with a K, not a C. It's K - I - S - S."

"Oh. Um... Cave!" Jonah was on the bed, kicking his legs against the frame.

"Good job! OK -- cabin," Juliet said. A rhythmic, almost musical knock at the door. "Yeah?" she called.

"Hey, open sesame, it's me."

"Alice!" Jonah said, jumping up.

Alice threw the door open, shaking raindrops from her bobbed hair. "Ugh, I bloody hate rainy season." She paused to kiss the top of Jonah's head.

"Yeah, and I hate when you don't take off your Wellies in my damn house, Al."

"Oh, not this again, your majesty." Alice rolled her eyes and leaned against the wall, pulled off the first boot.

Juliet went back to her bandages. "What's up?"

Alice wobbled a little, standing on one leg while she removed her second boot. "Happy now?" she mocked, waving her boot in the air. "So, any tea?"

Juliet gestured around the cabin. "Does it really look like I have a kitchen in here?"

"Sorry, I guess that was a stupid question. I'm just not in the mood to try to get a fire started right now." Alice plopped down on the bed, wet clothes and all. "So, I have something I need to ask you."

Whenever Alice announced she had a question, she always wanted to know something about time. It was inevitable, the unspoken warning about the issue all the travelers tried to dance around. And hey, when Alice ever had a question about anything else, she would just ask straight out. Alice was never quite known for her tact.

Juliet paused to pull out Jonah's blocks from under the bed, something to distract him with, and raised an eyebrow toward Alice. "Proceed."

"How much traveling have you done, and how long ago?"

"Well. Last time Jonah was only maybe about ... three months old, I think. That flaming arrow night I told you about."

"Ugh, yeah, that sounded downright brutal. But before that?"

"Well, getting here, obviously, but that was the bomb -- or the not-bomb -- I still don't know what happened there. I was in the '70s straight through for three years. Before that, a lot of flashes really fast, all together. Maybe ten or twenty of them? The time spans were pretty far apart, too -- I saw the statue still intact."

"Bloody hell, I've never seen that. All right, let's see, you've been here, what, three and a half years? Plus the three, that would have been six and a half years ago with the multiple flashes. What about nosebleeds?"

"One after the flaming arrow night. The bomb -- I don't know, there was blood everywhere. In the series of flashes, yeah, I started getting them."

"How were they? Mild, moderate, severe?"

Juliet was rapidly developing a bad feeling about this line of questioning. "Sort of mild, I guess. I saw the end result for someone else, and..."

Alice nodded, wincing. "I know. It isn't pretty, is it? Well, the good news, love, is you should be up for a few more goes."

"Alice? Do something for me?"

"Yes?"

"Please get the hell out of my cabin."

"Oh, come on, don't you owe me a favor or two?" Alice crooned, turning on the well-practiced charm.

"So let me fold your laundry or something."

"Jules. I've seen you with the rifle, come on, you're bloody brilliant! And you throw away all that talent on boar hunting and playing at target practice? What a waste!"

"Listen, Daniel Boone, I know this might sound a little crazy to someone like you. But I much prefer taking the bullets _out_ of people as opposed to putting them _in_."

"Oh, don't be such a whiner! You're here for the good of this island, are you not?"

"Technically, I think I'm here because I was repeatedly manipulated and screwed over."

"Jules. Seriously, love. I'm not telling you what to do, but I'm asking you. For a favor. As a friend. Just this one time. You don't like it, you're automatically out after."

"I can't let anything happen to me, you understand that? Jonah -- "

"I would never let anything happen to you, Jules! You're Jonah's mother. I get that. You're the most important person in the world to him. But trust me, there's no danger. I just need someone with a solid, dependable crack shot."

"Are you going to tell me why?"

"Now where would be the fun in that?"

_Now where would be the fun in that?_ Well, if that wasn't that just what John had said before falling down the well at the Orchid. And that hadn't exactly ended well. Or had it? The whole chain of events seemed to make less and less sense the more she knew about it all. She locked eyes on Alice, waiting for a real answer.

"Jules. What I can tell you is this is for the good of the island and everyone here. Haven't you ever asked a friend to do something for you, and you just needed them to trust you?"

For some reason then, she thinks of going with Jack to the Tempest. Of seeing Harper in the jungle. Of asking Jack to trust her. "Yes."

------ END FLASHBACK ------

An hour later, Juliet opens the front door quietly. Her face is streaked with sweat, her calves twitching and cramping. Blisters on the backs of her heels. It's not like she'd been wearing appropriate footwear for a no-holds-barred, teeth-clattering run. She creeps upstairs, takes a shower. Closes her eyes and feels the water on her face. Her body is sore in a delicious way.

The bathroom's filled up with steam by the time she's finally done. She wipes a corner of the mirror clear, looks at herself.

Finally allows herself to think about that very last visitor to the island, before things finally, irrevocably went straight to hell.

Practices the poker face until her eyes glaze over.

Finally she wraps a green towel around herself and opens the door, lets the steam escape into the hall. And nearly drops her towel.

"Uh... Sorry. Heard you came back in." James is trying to look anywhere except directly at her. "Didn't realize, uh..." He shoves his hands in his pockets.

"Yeah, sorry, I just... wanted to take a shower. I'm, uh, going to get dressed, OK?"

"OK. Yep." James' eyes are open unnaturally wide as he pretends to stare at the wall.

Juliet rushes into the bedroom, slams the door. _Now what the hell was all that about? _She takes off her towel, rubs her hair with it. "What time do you have to pick up Clementine?" she calls through the door.

"'Bout half an hour. You wanna come?"

"OK. Be out in a few."

* * *

They're in the Jeep, windows down, with Jonah in the back. James must have bought a second booster seat at Target -- hadn't mentioned it outright, but she'd seen the flattened box in the kitchen, stuffed between the fridge and the too-small recycling bin. And the new seat was just _there_, in the back. Juliet closes her eyes, runs her fingers through her hair -- she'd actually bothered to blowdry it straight this afternoon, and it feels sweetly foreign.

She puts her right hand out the window, feels the warm breeze through her spread fingers. "What's Clementine think about all this so far?"

James shrugs. "Well, it's been all of, what? Twenty-four hours now? Honestly, I dunno. I mean, she and him" -- James jerks his head toward the back seat -- "seem to be gettin' along great, and I'm real glad about that. But I think she felt kinda pushed aside before. Her mom got married and started another family, and whenever things got too crazy in that house, she'd call me or come over and it was kinda her quiet place, y'know?"

"I'm sorry, James."

"Hey, what did I tell ya? You don't got nothin' to be sorry about."

She lets that slip by. "You said Cassidy is out of town for the next two weeks?"

"Ah, yeah, well, that's the other thing. Cass just got divorced now. She took her little kids to her mom's for this week and then next week, she's takin' a cruise with her chick friends to, uh, celebrate."

That didn't sound like the worst idea, all things considered. "Wish I'd taken a cruise when I finalized _my_ divorce."

"Yeah, what'd you do instead?"

She tries out her best innocent scientist look. "Impregnated a male field mouse."

"Oh, please, that's your answer for everything," James groans.

"Well, come on, it is a good one. It's not one you hear every day, is it?"

"Yeah, I'll give you that."

The conversation peters out. Juliet watches the dips of the power cords along the road as they speed past. She's tired, so tired all of a sudden, but she feels like she won't know what to do if they stop talking. "Three questions?"

James nods once, a short jerk of his chin. "Yeah."

"My turn now, though, OK? What's the first thing you did -- after you remembered?"

"Shit -- uh, I mean, darn," he says, nodding his head again toward the back seat. Smirks. "Broke my cell phone."

Juliet can't help it; she starts to laugh. James grins, doesn't say a word, just waits. Finally she manages, "You did not!"

"I did so, swear to God."

She reaches into her back pocket, hands him her phone. "Would you please break this one, too?"

"Hey, no can do, blondie, those things are crazy expensive," he says, still holding her phone.

"Richard gave it to me. I really don't care very much."

James drops the phone in her lap like it's tainted; he's startled but keeping his eyes (mostly) on the road. "He gave that thing to you _in 1925_?"

"I really have no idea," she says, rolling her eyes. "Seriously. All I know is they could manipulate time a little bit better than we'd thought. OK, or a lot better."

"Son of a .... OK, so do I get to ask a question now, or is this all your show?"

"I get to ask all three, straight through. Them's the rules. What did you do after the plane crash, before you remembered? In your other set of memories?"

James tells her about quitting conning, how it hadn't felt right anymore. How there was something he couldn't pinpoint. He tells her about writing to Cassidy, beginning his relationship with his daughter. "Got a night job in security, too."

"You did_ not_."

"What is it with you not believin' my answers, blondie? Something in the back of my head kept goin', that's all. I don't know why I would have started tryin'a turn things around if it hadn't, y'know."

Juliet feels sort of quietly thrilled for James, that things had started to get better for him after the plane, well, didn't crash. All she can manage out loud is, "Weird." But after she says it, she remembers her picture tucked into the book in the basement. And realizes that she just got nicknamed again.

James makes a strange face at her, one that she can't quite interpret. He tells her about taking college courses, moving to Oregon, starting library school. "Third question?"

"Well, OK, what's the second thing you did after you remembered?"

James tightens his fingers around the steering wheel, looks down at the dashboard. It's the first time since she's been here that she's really seen him at a loss for words. She feels a pang of embarrassment. "It's all right, if you d -- "

He brings his eyes back up to the road that stretches in front of them. "Nah, it's just -- second thing I did was look you up."

She has momentarily forgotten how to speak. "Oh," is the only thing that is able to slip from her lips.


	24. A Visitor

_"If there were a map of the solar system, but instead of stars it showed people and their degrees of separation, my star would be the one you had to travel the most light-years from to get to his. You would die getting to him."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

Holy crap. Much as James is thrilled to see her (and he is, if he'll let himself be honest), the woman is a mess. In the course of a single day, she'd joked around with him, picked a fight, apologized profusely, cheerfully told him about Jonah's babyhood, cried hysterically, picked a fight with her sister, rushed out, and then came back and joked around with him some more.

James figures there's not much he can do other than go along for the ride, but he's worried. A lot worried. Something is really wrong with her.

His mind bounces to the black mark she'd showed him, the one burned into her back. OK, yeah, being kidnapped and essentially resurrected by the island's own personal version of Satan was enough to drive anyone insane. But that had happened at the beginning -- and she'd told him quite happily about some of her time there. This Alice woman, that had to be the source of a lot of her grief, the way she'd sobbed. Whatever had happened must have been terrible.

But James can't shake the feeling that there's something else. Something she's entirely avoided mentioning so far. Maybe something she's entirely avoiding about thinking. He's seen this in the prisoners at work, how when they have something entirely bottled up, they'll often explode in unpredictable ways.

They're out eating dinner on the back deck, the four of them. They'd barbecued, Juliet had sliced up the veggies and mixed up a damn good marinade, and everything's been delightfully normal for a couple hours now, all things considered. Juliet has just brought a glass of water to her lips when Jonah looks up from his food, looks over at Juliet. "Mama, is Joe dead?"

Juliet freezes. Eventually lowers the glass to the table, but leaves her fingers wrapped around it. "Why -- would you say something like that?" she says in a monotone.

"Because I thought he was coming with us."

Clementine looks at James, confused.

_Oh, crap._ Juliet is all torn up about some island boyfriend. Of course. Why didn't he even think about something like that? No one could spend six years totally celibate -- or not form any sort of attachment that way.

Juliet isn't speaking, the expression on her face locked into some combination of horrified/poker. Finally James decides it's up to him to break the silence, the idiot that he is. "Jules, it's OK, if ... " but he realizes he can't get out the words.

She moves her eyes to his face, understanding. Closes her eyes and allows herself a half-smile. "It's nothing like that, James." Finally she looks at Jonah. "He is _not_ dead, Jonah. Don't say something like that. Ever."

"But where did he go? I thought he was coming with us. He said he'd be there in two hours."

"I thought so too. But we ran out of time, OK, buddy? I had to get you out of there."

James sees her hand -- the one that's still frozen to her water glass -- shaking. Clementine is giving Jules a crazy look. Finally Juliet draws in a ragged breath, and stands, starts collecting plates. When she comes to him, reaches out her hand, he touches her wrist. "Clem or I can do that."

"Maybe I need to do something right now, James." She measures out the words in the vocal equivalent of her poker face.

* * *

She brings the dishes into the house, turns on the water in the sink, hard. Finds detergent under the sink. Flips open the dishwasher. She feels like breaking every dish in front of her, but instead, she rinses them off, loads up the dishwasher, runs the garbage disposal.

Sits down at the kitchen table and buries her head in her hands.

------ FLASHBACK (1925) ------

She looked out at the ocean. Down at the sand. Let herself wonder, for maybe the millionth time, if this really was all there was ever going to be.

How this could ever really end. And she was worried about Alice. A lot worried.

Today marked exactly six years since she'd woken up in the jungle. Six years since she'd stumbled into this crazy, time-traveling group of Islanders. The sun was almost too bright, and her eyes were closed when she heard someone scuffling their way across the sand.

"Juliet?" It was a male voice, familiar in an unplaceable way.

Juliet opened her eyes and looked up, into the late afternoon sun at the tall man. He was maybe in his mid-30s, standing slightly stooped in front of her, tilting his head. She half-shook her head, not certain she knew who he was. His close-cropped dark blond hair was nearly swallowed by the sunlight until her vision adjusted, taking in the dark stubble across his jaw, the blue eyes, the slightly asymmetrical cleft chin.

"Son of a BITCH!" she gasped, scrambling backward across the sand on her hands and heels.

"I wouldn't say that if I were you," he said, and laughed.

"What. The HELL are you doing here?" she demanded.

"Jeez, what a greeting." He flopped down on the sand next to her and grinned, flashing a dimple. "I come all this way, and that's the best you can do?"

"Yeah, well, I think my heart just exploded, buddy."

"Oh, get over it," he said, smirking. "On the bright side -- I'm absolutely _positive_ you'll live, Ma."


	25. Remarkably Well Adjusted

_"I laughed and said, Life is easy. What I meant was, Life is easy with you here, and when you leave, it will be hard again."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

------- FLASHBACK CONTINUED (1925) ------

"Oh, buddy," she said sadly. "What are you doing here?"

"You know," he said, his eyes twinkling just like his father's, "so many people love revisiting their childhoods. It's just that most of them don't get to do it quite so literally."

The steely gaze of death proved impossible to direct to a nearly identical set of eyes. Instead she covered her face, trying to hide her smile. "You're all grown up. And you're alive."

"Damn straight I'm alive."

She reached out her hand, stroked his cheek, his forehead. Searched his eyes. "You know you shouldn't tell me anything, right? About wherever it was that you came from."

"Trust me, I know how it all works. I'll only share the utterly frivolous." He opened his arms and gave her a long hug.

She hugged back, as tightly as she dared. She couldn't decide what was worse: To think that he's never left the island and is just time traveling now -- or that he escaped at some point and now he's back. As they pulled apart, she said, "As glad as I am to see you, you know I wish you weren't here."

"I know. You made me pro -- "

"HEY! What did I just tell you?"

"Yeah, yeah, fine. It's harder than the manual makes it seem."

She sighed. "Couldn't you just be off somewhere in the future, happily living your life?"

"Hate to break it to you, Ma, but this sort of _is_ my life right now."

She tilted her head, not understanding.

"Well, I've been here about a year now. At the other camp, the one with more travelers." He smirked at her horrified look. "Oh, come on, you know that one's way more fun anyway. They have a guy there from the_ 22nd century!_ When he gets drunk and starts blabbing? It's fuckin' hilarious."

"Yeah, well, I'm thrilled you've been living it up," she said wryly. "That still doesn't explain why you're here."

"What, and miss all the fun? Everything's converging. You know we're in the whole vertex of events right here, right?"

"Not exactly, no."

"Right, I forgot, 'Wah wah, I was just a pawn,' yeah, OK, Dr. Warrior. Nice machete there." He nodded at the blade stuck into the sand a few feet away.

For Christ's sake, he sounds like James, Faraday and Miles rolled into one. She rolled her eyes. "How old are you, anyway?"

He shrugged. "Thirty-four," he said casually.

"You know you're supposed to be _five_, right?"

"Yeah, and how old are you supposed to be?"

"I won't even be conceived for another forty-five years."

"Yeah, time travel's a bitch."

"Your father used to say the same thing."

Jonah opened his mouth to speak, but she held up her hand. "I don't wanna know."

"Fine. Well, don't know 'bout you, but I sure could go for a beer."

"I think you've come to the wrong place for that. You want a frat party, buddy, go back to your own camp." She was bluffing and he knew it.

"Nah, I come bearing gifts." He opened his satchel, pulled out two bottles and a pocket knife. "Gotta be prepared for all eventualities, y'know? Sorry they're a little warm." He popped the tops expertly and handed one to her.

She held her bottle by the neck, didn't take a sip. Just looked at him. It was like the best gift and worst nightmare she could ever have, all rolled into one. "You know, I'm not entirely sure I should be having a beer with my five-year-old son."

He took a swig of his beer. "So. Out of all the weird things that have ever happened to you..."

"Well, guess I've finally found my number one," she said, and clinked her bottle against his.

* * *

"So, has your life been -- at least reasonably all right?" she asked him as they hiked back to her village.

"What happened to 'Don't tell me anything'?"

"Oh come on, throw me a scrap or two. Nothing major. But it would be nice to I didn't completely screw you up."

He grinned. "Nah, not completely. As you can see from my stunning demeanor, I'm remarkably well-adjusted. I mean, you alw -- "

"Hey!" She gave him a Look and then paused to whack a vine out of their narrow path with her machete.

"Y'know, this is gonna get really annoying if you keep interrupting me. I mean, whatever happened to 'whatever happened, happened'?"

"That last sentence makes my brain hurt." She pushed back the remaining vines and ducked under them, holding them up for him. "And you know, I'm not above sending you to your room without dinner."

"Time travelers," he scoffed. He ducked under the vines, saw her watching at him. He arched an eyebrow and gave her the blue-eyed death glare. Before she knew it, Juliet found herself doubled over laughing.

He started to laugh too. "Come on, you've had that coming to you your whole life!"

"I'm sorry, this is just too messed up," she protested, still laughing, covering her mouth with her hand.

"Yeah, well, trust me, it's plenty weird for me, too, if that makes you feel any better. I'm hiking through the jungle in 90-degree weather on Mystery Island. And my mom -- who's what? Eight years older than I am? -- has a wicked-ass machete in her hand."

She finally straightened up and found a path again, still smiling. "These vines aren't going to hack themselves out of our way, are they? All right, buddy, enough messing around. What are we supposed to tell people?"

"Do you actually think these people are going to be that shocked I'm your kid? And anyway, the first rule of time travel club is you don't talk about time travel club." He laughed, and she looked at him over her shoulder, confused. "Right, I forgot you haven't seen that movie."

She threw her hands into the air, partially charmed and partially exasperated by this her-James-Miles-Faraday hybrid trailing behind her like a duckling. "And see, right there, you give away too much. The very fact that you've even seen a movie in your life already tells me -- "

"OK, OK, OK! So I've been off the island and I came back. Don't tell me you're devastated to know that I've been to a movie theater."

"Well, thank God you've done something normal in your life."

"Now and again, yeah."

She hesitated for a long moment. "All right, listen. About half an hour before you showed up at the beach, Richard Alpert came to me and told me that he's supposedly getting me and you -- the little you -- off the island. Says he's getting together fake IDs and all that, says I'm supposed to leave. I'm not sure whether I believe him or not, but I'd rather not know details. At least not yet."

"Fine."

"Does anyone here actually know there are two of you now, or what?"

"Eh, a couple people do. I mean, look at me -- although I could at least pass as your brother. Anyway, if it's worrying you that much, I mostly go by Joe, anyway."

She huffed in disapproval. "I like your name."

"Please, if it had been up to you, I think my name would have been Buddy."

"I'm getting the feeling that we could go around in circles all day. But if at any point you would actually like to tell me why you're here, and it doesn't break any rules, please feel free, because I'm not getting any younger."

"Actually, as you just pointed out, you're negative forty-five. I don't think you could get much younger. _But_," he quickly added after she shot him a glare over her shoulder, "I'm here for a couple reasons. And judging by your special request to not know too much, I'll tell you one of them, OK? And it's a pretty damn good one, if I do say so myself."

"I'm listening."

"I'm a physicist. I'm part of the team who's been bringing travelers to the island. I've been working remotely for most of the past few years, but it was time for me to join up here."

"You're a physicist," she repeated slowly.

"That would be correct."

No wonder she was getting such a Faraday vibe off him when he was talking about the "vertex of events" and converging and whatever else earlier. Seriously, a fucking physicist? Couldn't he just be sitting in a lab somewhere? Giving a nice little Power Point presentation to bored undergrads in an air-conditioned lecture hall? She couldn't have encouraged him to go into something a little less involved in, oh, herding members of a time-traveling militia to Craphole Island? And a little less involved with exposing himself to a mind-boggling array of dangerous situations?

Juliet stopped, turned, trained her eyes on him. "I have a terrible feeling that you've sunk most of your life into the island, one way or another. But why do you have to sound so _cheerful_ about it?"

"Because I'm right where I'm supposed to be."

"See, now that I refuse to believe. You know, considering we're about to go pick up another one of you from Dottie in about 15 minutes."

"Then you're just gonna have to trust me."


	26. On the Floor

**Note: if you're confused by the second flashback in this, try checking out Ch. 15 again. I think together they will help things make sense. Also, sorry folks, not too much James in this one. Soon, my pretties, soon.**

* * *

_"I walked down the hall and saw that [she] was sitting on the floor next to a chair. This is always a bad sign. It's a slippery slope, and it's best just to sit in chairs, to eat when hungry, to sleep and rise and work. But we have all been there. Chairs are for people, and you're not sure if you are one."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

------FLASHBACK CONTINUED (1925) -------

"Now, but out in the real world," he said. "Face it, I'd be an awesome bootlegger."

"Early 1960s. Kennedy era. The clothes, I'd fix a thousand Dharma vans to buy those clothes."

"1450. Would beat Da Vinci to all his inventions."

"Oh, sure, if you wanna play it that way, let's go back to Ancient Rome and I'll do the first Caesarian."

Dottie was writing something in a notebook when they approached. Jonah looked up from his book and tilted his head curiously at the stranger standing next to his mother.

"Thanks, Dottie."

"Sure thing. Oh, hey, Joe! What are you doing over here?"

He smirked and shrugged. "Oh, thought I'd come visiting."

Juliet just barely refrained from smacking the taller, older version of her son on the shoulder before turning to look at the smaller, quieter, non-smart-ass version. "Hey buddy, this is our friend Joe. He's going to be visiting with us for a little while."

Jonah shrugged. "Hi," he said, and looked back down at his book.

The grown-up version leaned over to Juliet, amazed. "I remember this," he whispered. "I loved that book."

------ END FLASHBACK ------

James opens the back door loudly on purpose. Juliet is sitting at the kitchen table staring off into the distance like she's lost in another time. "Uh, kids are puttin' their bikes away," he says stiffly.

She looks up, momentarily confused. "What time is it?"

"'Bout 8:15. Streetlights just came on."

"I put the dishes in." She moves her head, listening for the sound of the dishwasher.

"You all right?"

"Yes, James. I'm fine." Juliet looks up at him with a blank face.

Shit, he's lost her again. Wherever she is, it isn't in this house. "Y'know I think I can handle getting the boy to bed tonight. You two are readin' what, the first Harry Potter?" She brings her eyes to his face, and for a moment he'd reminded of the look in her eyes when he'd plunged from the ocean all those years ago.

_That our ship?_

_... It was._

"Thank you, James. Could you call me so I can come up and say good night?"

He wants to scream until the universe collapses, fold his arms around her until she gasps for air, grind Ben's rotting corpse into dust. Instead he clamps his jaw and nods once, roughly. _Shit this is hard._

But then, when's anything ever been easy? Not for six years, or nine, or twelve or thirty-six has it ever been easy.

* * *

Juliet's footsteps are light, quiet on the basement stairs. Knows she shouldn't, but finds her feet tracing this morning's path to the corner bookcase. Slides Carrie off the shelf.

Her picture is gone.

For a moment, panic engulfs her, like she's imagined the whole thing. That she's disappearing. That it isn't because James must have pulled the picture from the book because he was afraid of her finding it. That, instead, this is what she deserves. Because she couldn't wait for her grown-up son to get off the island, and whatever happened, happened or didn't or will or won't, and maybe he's still stuck back there and maybe he's back where he belongs, but she could protect the little one who depended on her for everything, or the grown one who'd become her best friend in only three weeks, and either or both, they are the same, they are both her son, and she'd been forced to choose and it was not a choice at all, and that was what why it felt like half of her had died.

It was losing James all over again, and every hour she'd been here in this house was like losing both of them all over again, she didn't know whether she was losing James more and more right when she should have been finding him again, or she was just losing herself. And how was she supposed to tell him about Joe anyway?

Daniel Faraday. Daniel Faraday in this year, this present, now. If she goes to find Faraday, if she were to find her way back, she would be leaving her son here. She couldn't have both, even if they were one and the same. And if she goes back to that island, she's dead the instant her feet touch the sand._ Let's call it smoke inhalation._

Her shoulder aches. She twists, moves her arm behind her. Looks to the side. Sees a pad of paper and a pen on the coffee table. Like it's always been there, waiting for her.

The pen feels cool and strange in her hand, like it's not a pen at all, but an arrow, a gun, a scalpel, a wrench, the spoke of a frozen wheel. She sits on the cool linoleum floor, a foot away from the couch, not touching it.

She writes: _Everything is all tangled up and wrapped around everything else. So where am I supposed to begin?_

She folds the paper into the book. Slides the book back onto the shelf, leaves it sticking out a little more than the others. Turns out the light and goes upstairs so she's ready when James calls her to kiss their son goodnight.

------ FLASHBACK (1923) ------

"You're beautiful, you know that?" Nicholas whispered as he kissed her temple.

She tried to hide a blush, couldn't. "Shut up," she murmured.

"What, I can't tell you you're beautiful? You know I've missed you."

Juliet felt her face grow blank. She'd ended things with Nicholas shortly after she'd decided she really hadn't felt enough of anything for him. But Alice had been a little too charmingly persuasive once again, telling her how much he cared about her and telling her just to give it one more shot, what a good match he was for her. Juliet still wasn't sure exactly how that had translated into ending up in his bed again, especially considering how busy everything else seemed to be getting lately.

At least it had all conspired to help her push James back into a tiny little portion of her heart that she seemed to be able to lock up and leave unattended for increasingly long amounts of time. And anyway, every time she unlocked that compartment, she wished she hadn't.

(It felt like almost-drowning in the Hydra all over again.)

Now she yawned and stretched, pulled the sheet around her tighter. "I need to get up."

"What are you doing today?"

"Alice is sending me out."

Nicholas shook his head. "I was supposed to be going to that. Alice kicked me off traveling for awhile because I've been having an uptick in nosebleeds lately."

Her medical instinct took over and she touched the side of his face, with a clinician's hand and not a lover's. "What? How bad are they?"

He made a face, took her hand. "She wants me off duty for at least six months. I don't want you going on that mission, though. It's too dangerous."

"Nick, I'll be fine. I've gone on half a dozen already and everything's worked out exactly as planned."

"Yeah, but that's because they were all ambushes. This one coming up is a redo."

She flinched. "Shit." Redone battles were the worst. All parties involved knew all the other parties involved, their weaknesses, their strengths, their arsenal of weapons. They knew who'd lived and who'd died the during first round, or during the multiple previous rounds in some cases. The more times a battle was fought, the harder it got, it was more mental than anything. Opponents had to know each other, truly know each other, and know who'd change things and who'd be likely to repeat the same moves in the hope of surprise.

"Don't go, Jules."

She narrowed her eyes, pulled the sheet higher, shivered despite the warm morning light. "Have I ever gone before?" That was the goal of some of the redone battles -- the further the victor destroyed the enemy, the less likely the obliterated were to remember.

"No, and that's what I'm worried about. You don't send a new player to a redone battle. It doesn't work. Dammit, what the hell is Alice thinking? You have a kid to raise. You don't need to get stuck in any time loops. Come on." He reached for his clothes, slipped over his neck the chain that hung heavy with the key.

------ END FLASHBACK ------


	27. Too Many Variables

_"Yes, yes, yes, this was a lie but, we needed it because we were four people lying on the kitchen floor."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

Juliet pokes her head up the second set of stairs and can hear James still reading to Jonah, faking a wonderfully terrible Hagrid voice. She's unloading the dishwasher when Clementine ambles into the kitchen, fills a glass with water and leans against the sink. She holds one arm across her ribs and props her elbow onto it, holding the glass lazily just below her chin. Narrows her eyes slightly, watching Juliet.

Clementine must resemble Cassidy more, Juliet thinks, with the heart-shaped face and thick-textured sandy brown hair, but there's something so _James_ about the suspicious squint of those hazel eyes. Juliet crosses the room, drops the forks and spoons and knives into their appropriate baskets in the silverware drawer. Clementine's eyes follow her as she returns to the dishwasher.

Juliet is thinking about Sayid's simmering anger in the jungle on their trek back from the Barracks, the evening before she'd joined the beach camp.

_All right, let's have it._

And while she's never tortured anyone on behalf of the Iraqi Republican Guard, she has definitely been a resentful eleven-and-a-half-year-old girl staring down some woman at her father's place.

"All right, let's have it."

Clementine looks surprised for a moment; she hasn't yet learned the masks that adults can wear. "How come I never met you before?"

"I was living overseas."

"Yeah, where?"

"The South Pacific."

"And why'd you come back?"

"Do you know the term 'political unrest'?"

Clementine shrugs.

"The government wasn't stable anymore. So we left."

"How come my dad never talked about you before?"

"You'll have to ask him that yourself."

"You ever been married?"

"Once. I'm divorced." She thinks, _and then he died, but I guess maybe he didn't after all._ How does that even work? She didn't get a reset, and neither did Ben, but it seemed like everyone else did. So how'd she get to the island if Edmund never died? Or maybe he's still dead, didn't get a reset either? She's going to have to get a notebook or something, start trying to figure this all out.

Clementine nods, like, _hey, divorce happens._ "How'd you get that?" She points to the now-fading scar on Juliet's collarbone.

Juliet's hand hovers over the line. "In an accident."

"Did it hurt?"

"Yes."

"Where'd you live before?"

"Florida."

"That where you're going back to, after? Florida?"

"I guess so."

"How long are you staying?"

"Don't know. A few days."

Silence.

"Can I say something now?"

Clementine shrugs.

"I'll take that as a yes. I want you to know I'm not trying to get in the way of what you have here. I know you're close with your dad. I would never do anything to harm that. I'm glad you get along with your brother. And I want you to have fun while he's here. That's all."

She considers this, but narrows her eyes again. "I liked _Laura_ better."

Some previous girlfriend. Juliet pauses. At least she didn't say Kate. And Juliet doesn't know why this should suddenly strike her as hilarious, but it does. She lets the grin overtake her face and she holds her hand over the beginning of her laugh, which she somehow, suddenly has no desire to contain. She takes her hand away, presses it to the back of her neck, looking down at the open door of the dishwasher, still laughing.

Clementine doesn't know what to make of this, it's clear, but she eventually laughs, too. Juliet finally looks up and they smile uneasily at each other. Finally Clementine shakes her head, rolls her eyes, still grinning, and turns and thunders down the basement steps.

* * *

The kid is half-asleep anyway when James finally climbs down from the top bunk (no one over 40 should let their kids have these fucking things) and goes to the top of the stairs, calls softly for Juliet. He sees her poke her head around the corner of the landing and nods her up. "Sorry, he's mostly out already."

"That's all right," she says softly, touching his elbow as she passes him on the stairs. He realizes maybe it's the first time she's voluntarily touched him since she'd arrived yesterday, and then he thinks maybe he should stop standing on the stairs doing nothing like an idiot.

* * *

Juliet climbs up awkwardly to the top bunk. Jonah rolls over sleepily, and she wedges herself between him and the railing. "Hey buddy, I wanted to say goodnight."

He throws an arm across her. "Mama, I missed you."

"I'm right here," she whispers.

"Stay w'me 'til I fall asleep?" he mumbles, his eyes closed. "I missed you."

"Of course I will," she murmurs, rubbing his back. "I love you, buddy. Go to sleep."

When she's sure he's asleep, she brushes her hand over his hair, thinks about the way he was in the future, in the past, when he was, or will be, four inches taller than she. The way he'd rolled his eyes at her and laughed when she complained about how he kept letting minor details slip about the future. How appalled he'd looked the first time she'd slapped a gun into his hand and she got to laugh right back at him. Those pointless jungle hikes back and forth between their two villages, sorting things out. The night they'd gotten drunk with Faraday at the edge of his camp because they had nothing better to do. The day he was screaming at her to go, that he'd be there in two hours.

All those things, in the future, in the past. "I miss you, too," she whispers.

* * *

James is out on the back deck when he hears Juliet slide the door open. He's already set up with a couple of beers, a bottle of white wine and an empty glass. "Waiting for someone?" she says comically, standing behind him.

"Not anymore."

She pours herself some wine and sits down on the top step. (_Don't you ever sit on chairs? _he wants to ask.) "Thanks," she says.

He sits down next to her, clinks his beer against her glass. "Some day," he says.

"Yeah." They sip in silence, watch the fireflies start up. Or, more accurately, he watches her watching the fireflies, her face tense and her eyes searching the darkness. He wants to know what's hurting her so badly, but he's half-afraid of knowing. Maybe more than half-afraid. Can't help feeling like he's caused whatever it was that did this to her. He left her there for so long.

He should have fucking tried harder. Figured it out. Gotten her out of there. He feels a shiver of self-loathing under his ribs. "Tired?"

She nods, still looking away. "My sleep quality's been pretty lousy lately."

"What do you think the wine's for?"

"I thought maybe it was to loosen my tongue so you could get all the good island gossip."

"Ah, see, there's that too, but I can barely keep up with that damn daycamp gossip. Jesus Christ, who's dating who, who sent this one a text about that one, the things these kids worry about, it's like a goddamn soap opera sometimes."

"In other words, exactly like the island. But with text messages. And less ammo, I'd hope." She grins. "But as long as they keep you entertained."

"Yeah, about that." God, here he is with his stupid mundane life, worrying about stuff that Juliet never got to consider once in the past dozen years. "So, uh, tomorrow's Friday. Usually when I got Clem, I take her and her friends to the outdoor movie. Drive-ins, the new retro throwback thing 'round here, got a family feature soon as it gets dark, before the main show at 10. The old geezers like me set up lawn chairs and the kids run amok, actin' like they don't know us. I dunno if you two would be up for that sorta thing -- I mean, we don't have to go if you don't feel up to it -- but it's that new Pixar movie and I think Little J might get a kick out of it." He finishes his stupid little speech.

"No, that sounds good. He -- " She stops short and her lips turn up. James watches her, lost in thought with a private smile not meant for him. He tries to catch her eyes and eventually she brings her gaze to meet his. "Sorry," she says. "I think that would be good. I don't know how long his attention span will be, but... mine's not the best, either, these days, so I suppose at least he'll be in good company."

"Trust me, this is all we got to look forward to. Me and a buncha other hyper-attentive helicopter parents with a surplus of hybrid Subaru Outbacks. Plus, I really don't wanna piss off three eleven-year-old girls." He cracks open another beer.

"Oh yeah, that's not a demographic you want to mess with." Something in the tone of her voice, the sudden aversion of her eyes, sets off minor warning bells in the back of his head.

"Hey, she's not givin' you a hard time, is she?" He could swear through the darkness that Juliet's blushing slightly.

She shakes her head a bit too emphatically. "No." Pours herself more wine.

_Oh, shit._ "What'd she say?"

"James -- "

"No, c'mon, tell me what she said." Goddammit, Clem could learn to keep her mouth shut just once in awhile. She was like her mother in that way, and while he was (for the most part) thrilled that no one was EVER gonna pull one over on Clem, and Clem would NEVER let anyone give her shit, he was gonna have to try to work on the definition of tact with her one of these days. Not that he was someone who could ever really lecture on something like tact, but it was better than nothing.

"It's fine, James. She needs some space right now. Let it go."

He feels a cloud of tension setting them over now, and frankly, he's feeling a little ticked off that Jules won't tell him whatever it was that Clem said or did. She's his daughter, for Christ's sake, and he's gotta care if she's being rude. Finally he says, "Well, if there's anything you wanna let me know, you can tell me about it. I don't like you walking around here in a daze."

He watches her bite the inside of her cheek. "If something bad were to happen, in the future, would you want to know about it?"

"How bad?"

She sips her wine. "I'm not sure. Maybe not so bad. Maybe the worst thing possible."

"That's a pretty big disparity."

"That's what makes it more confusing."

"Could I do somethin' about it, or not?"

"I don't know."

"Then Danny Boy would say somethin' about there bein' too many variables or some shit like that."

"I know."

"Jules... You need to talk to him about somethin'?"

"Maybe. Well, he w -- " She censors herself and he tries to shrug off a flicker of irritation. "Could we just keep this hypothetical for now?" she asks. "It's not something that should be discussed over alcohol. Trust me, that only makes it worse." She smiles slightly at some far-off memory, takes a sip of wine. "So. Would you want to know? If it turned out you couldn't do anything about it?"

"No."

She flinches and nods.

Shit, is that the wrong answer? He was just trying to be honest. "This got anything to do with 'whatever happened, happened' not workin' right no more?"

Juliet downs the remnants of her wine glass. "You remember when our biggest problem was a leaky roof during rainy season or what we were bringing to the Dharma potluck?"

_OK, change the subject, fine._ "Now, those were the days. Leavin' all that quantum physics shit to Chang. Though you did get pretty stressed the night you burned that damn quiche."

"Yeah, and see? I've never made another one since."

"I'm sure that spinach farmers worldwide thank you for that."

She grins, maybe a little flushed from the wine, and bumps her shoulder against his. He decides to risk it. Wraps his arm around her other shoulder. She immediately tenses, he feels her shoulder blades shift, and he's ready to retreat, but then she relaxes against him. Puts her head on his shoulder.

They stay like that for a long time, watching the fireflies streak light across the yard.


	28. A Key and a Notebook

_"For how long can you behold another person? Before you have to think of yourself again, like dipping the brush back in for more ink."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

She's pitching the cat out into the hall on the second morning just as James pokes his head out the door of the den.

"Aw, c'mon, don't tell me you're that heartless," he growls.

"She sheds."

"What, you think I dunno that? 'Sides, you're in her territory, not the other way around." He smirks and opens the door the rest of the way.

He's wearing pajama bottoms and no shirt and _OK, wow_, he looks pretty much as good as she remembered, tan and well-muscled and hey, maybe even better than she remembered, and suddenly she finds herself staring at the wall with unnaturally wide eyes just like he was doing yesterday in this very same hall. _Seriously?_ They have a child together, it's not like she's never seen him without a shirt before, and she forces her eyes back to his. "I don't like cat hair in the bed."

"Listen, I was gonna take a shower but y'want me to make you coffee first? I doubt ya can figure out my complicated futuristic coffeemaker."

She nods, trying to swallow her smile. "If you have time."

"Yeah, hang on." James ducks back into the den and comes back out pulling a T-shirt over his head. _Thank God. _She remembers how to blink.

Meanwhile, the cat has detected weakness in Juliet and runs back into the master bedroom. _Fine, Cat. Fine. You win today._

Juliet is now feeling a little overexposed in her skimpy, maybe-too-low tank top, she follows the cat back into the bedroom, finds her beat-up FSU sweatshirt draped over the edge of the bed. As she's pulling it over her head she begs the blush on her face to _please, please go away right now._

James watches her from the halllway. "Cold?"

"I don't know how you people live up here," she says, extending a hand toward the rainy gray day on the outside of the windows. Better than saying, _suddenly I felt like I was half-naked._

"Oh please, you just came from a place that has a whole damn rainy season," he retorts, then raps his knuckles against the doorway of the center bedroom. "You up?" he calls.

Clementine responds with a muffled whine.

"Twenty minutes, Sleepin' Beauty! I want you downstairs in_ twenty minutes_. An' it's rainin' today so find your windbreaker!"

Juliet can only stand there and watch him, it's like James has passed some sort of milestone in her sleep and he simply came out the other side a loving, albeit slightly grumpy dad, still with the nicknames and the bad language, and it's still him, just ... more. And she missed it all, missed the boat, missed the flash, whatever one might want to call it, and she's just treading water, struggling, waiting, trying to figure out the next handhold to grasp.

He notices her staring at him and reaches out, touches the back of her elbow. "Ready?"

They go downstairs. He shows her how to use the coffeemaker, standing closer to her than he technically needs to; the digital display looks complicated but it's easier than programming a VCR (not that those are still around, anyway). Once the coffee is brewing, he fishes a key from the cluttered drawer next to the fridge. "Extra key," he explains. "Case you wanna go out or somethin' when I'm not around."

"Oh. Thanks." She presses the sharp edges of the key into her palm for a moment, feeling a bit dazed. Rachel had essentially babysat her while she'd been in Miami, not that she'd minded, but other than flying and obtaining assorted rental cars and that two-day stint in Long Beach (during which they'd gone merely from the hotel to the beach and back), Juliet's not quite sure she's done anything on her own in the two weeks she'd been back in the real world.

"All right, I gotta go get dressed 'fore I take Her Highness to camp. She only got a half-day 'cause it's Friday, so we're gonna have to figure out how to keep 'em from destroyin' the house this afternoon. Goddamn rain." He nods and jogs off toward the stairs, calling over his shoulder, "Don't you drink all that coffee on me, y'hear?"

She pours herself a cup and sits at the table, picking at the threads on her battered college sweatshirt. Could it all really be this easy?

* * *

When James comes back from dropping off Clem, Juliet's writing in a blue spiral notebook and Jonah's sitting at the table with her, munching on a bagel.

"We got bagels, James," Jonah announces seriously.

"Hey," she says, looking up and smiling at him. "They're over by the toaster."

"You got bagels?" he repeats.

"I have ten years of higher education, James, I think I can get bagels." She smiles again. For some reason she looks better, happier than he's seen her the entire time she's been here. She looks back down and starts writing again.

Well, hell, bagels are bagels. He pops one into the toaster oven, watches her hand scrawl over the page. She stands, still holding the notebook, reading over what she's just written as she pours herself more coffee. "You get yourself a notebook too?"

"The CVS is next to the bagel store. Don't you know your own neighborhood?" She tilts her head, smirking at him a little.

"Ah, see, now you're just mockin' me."

"I like doing what I do best," she says. Closes the notebook and looks at him, leans against the counter.

He winks just as the toaster buzzes. "Lucky me," he says and he catches the hint of a blush before she manages to quell it.

* * *

Jonah is miraculously easy to distract with Legos and when James comes back from the downstairs room, Juliet's sitting on the living room couch, one leg tucked underneath her. She's writing in her blue notebook again and looks sleepy despite the coffee. James remembers what she'd said last night about her sleep patterns being screwed up.

"You OK? You want to go back to bed, I can man the fort here."

"But see, now I've had too much coffee. There is no going back to bed," she says, closing her notebook and sticking it between her side and the arm of the couch.

He nods and flops down on the couch next to her. She looks at him.

"Three questions, or are you havin' too good of a morning for that sorta thing?"

She shrugs. "We may as well keep going. Besides, you showed me how to use that coffeemaker, so I'm feeling a bit charitable right now."

"What's with the sweatshirt?"

Juliet laughs. "It's the warmest thing I own, considering where I just came from. Miami, I meant, not... the island. I know it's horrible-looking, but I'm sort of attached to it." Her voice lowers. "It's the only article of clothing Rachel had left from my first life." She bites her lip, already looking sad again.

"Aw, crap. I'm sorry, Jules. Maybe we shouldn't do this."

She shakes her head. "The more you keep asking me, the less I have to talk about later, right? Second question."

"What were you gonna say yesterday before Jonah came back upstairs?"

She leans forward slightly. "What would you say if I told you I wasn't the only time traveler there?"

He raises his eyebrows. "So Craphole Island still had a couple of aces up its sleeve?"

"You could say that."

"Holy shit," he mutters.

She nods. "Exactly. Holy shit."

"When were they from? Hey, wait a sec, that don't count as my third question, right?"

"No... They were bringing them in from all over the place. From five years to two hundred years out. There was a guy from the 22nd century, someone told me."

"You're kiddin' me."

"Nope. Though I heard when he got drunk and started blabbing, it was hilarious."

He chuckles. "Yeah, guess I could imagine that. But ... holy shit, though."

"Yeah. I was living there a year and a half before anyone bothered to tell me." She grins sheepishly and James growls a laugh.

"Poor Jules, gettin' left all in the dark."

"Yeah, trust me, Alice laughed at me too."

He can't hide a wince. He has no idea what happened to Alice, only that it is obviously killing her to talk about it. "Uh -- sorry -- "

"James." She looks at him, the shadow of her poker face appearing. "It's all right. If everything we talk about has to have some kind of boundary... "

"Yeah."

_Change the subject, change the subject._ Even though, frankly, he can think of about a hundred questions about this time travel shit. "So you were their doctor? Uh, y'know, third question."

She nods, not meeting his eyes. "I stitched up lacerations, delivered a few babies, but when it came to taking bullets out of people -- " she shakes her head, ashamed. "I saved as many as I couldn't."

It incenses him, that she's holding herself responsible. "I'm sure ya did the best you could."

She shakes her head again. "Those patients should never have been mine. They needed a surgeon. Not me."

"Why didn't they have one? Thought you said -- I mean, they could get whoever they wanted there, right?"

"Oh. They had one, all right. At the other camp."

"What? Then why -- "

She looks up, her eyes huge and blue and sad and guilty. "It was a secret. I didn't know until the end. So they could control who lived and who died."

"What the hell?" he mutters.

"If the wound wasn't that bad, or they wanted someone to die -- they brought them to me. If it was someone they wanted, they found the surgeon, and kept it quiet."

"I thought you said these people were 'weirdly normal'," he says, twisting his face in confusion. "I thought you said they were good."

"Well, some of them were," she says, her face stricken. And some of them weren't."


	29. Distracted

_"It is terrible to have to ask for anything ever. We wish we were something that needed nothing, like paint. But even paint needs repainting."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

Those bastards. Is there anything she ever had that someone didn't manage to take from her? He feels his hands gripping the edges of the couch cushion, how can he be so furious and she's just sitting there numb? So he asks her. "Y'know what I never understood about you, blondie?" he asks.

"What?"

"How come you don't never just get mad like the rest of us?" People take advantage of Juliet's inherent goodness, they always have, and she goes and tries to do the right thing. And time and time again, she just gets fucked over. Maybe for once she should just do all the wrong things and see how that works for awhile.

"Because, James, if I got angry, I could stay angry forever. So. It's a rainy day. Can we just sit here on the couch and watch a silly movie? Please?" She leans back into the corner of the couch, pokes him with her foot.

"What, you playin' footsie with me now to distract me?"

"Pretty much. Hey, did I ever tell you what my favorite silly movie used to be? Before the island, I mean?"

He searches his memory. "Don't think so..."

"Airplane," she replies, arching an eyebrow.

He laughs. "Oh HELL no, we ain't watchin' that!"

She grins. "I didn't expect to. But do you have Back to the Future?"

"Hell yeah, whaddya think Miles an' Hugo an' I watch when they come visit?"

"You see them?"

"Yep. Jin sometimes, too."

She looks surprised. "That's great. Wow. How are they?"

"Well, you know. Hurley's got his chicken empire." He chuckles. "He's been pretty good lately, actually. Sane. Think you scared the shit out of him when you called him, though." He winks. "Miles is ... Miles. Still doin' that spiritualist fraud shit. He's happier, though. Better than in Dharma. Finally found himself a decent girl, too -- the big horndog. Jin and Sun, you know, they ... With the reset, they didn't have their daughter no more."

Her hand flies to her mouth, her face full of compassion. "Oh no. It hadn't -- it hadn't even crossed my mind. Oh no. How are they?"

"They were... Well, pretty devastated. They've adopted two little girls, though. Sang-hi and... uh ... Kyung-hwa? Haven't met the little one yet, though. Sang is a sweetie. Not mouthy yet like they get 'round Clem's age. She's 'bout four. The little one's just over a year."

"It's hard to think about. The people who weren't better off with the reset."

Is she trying to ask about Kate? He barely has time to wonder, or formulate a response, before she stands. "OK, mindless movie time. I'm serious. At least you still have DVDs and not some weird future-y thing, right?"

"Well, ah, technically they're Blu-Ray now."

She rolls her eyes. "Just stop talking."

* * *

Despite all the coffee, before they're halfway through the movie, she nestles her head into her shoulder. He watches her eyes lower, drop closed. Watches her as she tries to fight sleep, gives up. He looks at the way her eyelashes curl and how she shifts, a little fitfully, in her sleep.

He's not quite sure when he falls asleep either, he hadn't even felt particularly tired but he must have been lulled into it watching her. When he wakes up, the TV screen a solid blue square, he's sprawled across the couch and she's wedged in between him and the back of the couch, her head on his chest, a strand of blond hair across his lips.

What the...? They'd shifted unconsciously into the exact position they'd taken whenever they'd fallen asleep together on their crappy narrow couch in Dharmaville.

He moves slightly to unearth an arm, to brush her hair out of his face, but goddamn, it smells so good, even though it smells of the shampoo from upstairs, her hair somehow still smells exactly like he'd remembered, and he's paused with a handful of her curls draped across his palm when she blinks open her eyes.

"Um," she says, blushing, making no effort to move.

"Guess we fell asleep," he mumbles, letting go of the strand her hair.

She doesn't say anything for a moment, just looks at him expressionlessly, and he listens to the steady splatter of the rain outside, sounding just like rainy season on the island, and for a second they could have been on their tiny little couch in their tiny little yellow house in Dharmaville.

"Guess we were both tired," she says, and attempts to free the arm that's wedged, impossibly, under his right shoulder.

He tries to shift to the opposite side so she can free her arm and this should be awkward and it is, but somehow it's also not, and as she tries to pull out her left arm, she somehow fails to balance with the right, and she crashes back down to his chest and they smirk and OK, maybe it's more than a little awkward.

"You settin' up shop here or somethin'?" he teases.

She doesn't try to move again for the moment, just looks at him with her poker face.

"'Cause ya know... I ain't complainin'."

He watches the blush deepen slightly (is it just his imagination or has she been blushing practically this entire morning?), and she lets a slight smile replace the poker face and suddenly he realizes he can't resist anymore. Whatever fucked-up things are playing across her memories, they're not there right now, and he wants this and he's guessing by the fact that she's not moving away that she does too, and someone's gotta be first, and he reaches around her and flattens his hand against her lower back.

The smile fades from her face, replaced by surprise and uncertainty. He reaches up with his other hand and cups the side of her face. "Jules," he whispers, a question on his voice, and she answers him when she dips her head down to meet his lips.

Her mouth is warm and soft and sweetly inviting, and he curls his fingers around to grasp the nape of her neck and her lips part and he forgets his own name as the kiss deepens. It quickly moves beyond tentative as she reaches to grasp the back of his head, her fingers knotting into his hair, and hers has fallen around them like a sweet blond curtain, and nothing has ever tasted or felt as good as it does right now.


	30. The Lie

_"If he saw me, I would live. Look up, look up, look up. He raised his eyes, as if it were his own idea, and I waved."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

He's grasping fistfuls of her hair and she's got her hands underneath his shirt rolling her fingers over the sensitive skin on his stomach just over the waistband of his jeans. They haven't come up for air in what seems like eons when ... He hears the pitter-patter of little feet in the kitchen.

They spring apart, panting, like teenagers surprised by a parent's car in the driveway.

Jonah wanders into the living room and Juliet regains her composure first (naturally), although her eyes slide sideways with a non-verbal approximation of _we forgot about our freakin' kid_, and he answers back with,_ well, we fell asleep and then got a little... distracted_.

"Hey, buddy," Juliet says, still a little breathless. Jonah's rubbing his eyes and she reaches out an arm to him. "You fall asleep down there?"

He nods, and James forces himself to stifle a laugh because the poor kid has impression of the couch pillow on his cheek.

"That's funny, so did we," Juliet says, sounding impossibly innocent. "It must be because it's so rainy and gray outside." She turns to James. "What time do we have to leave for Clementine?"

He glances at the clock. "Uh ...should probably get going in about fifteen minutes."

Juliet looks back at the kid. "Let's get ready to go, OK?" She starts talking to him about Legos and as Jonah's leading her out of the living room, she throws a mildly devilish glare over her left shoulder, as it to say, _I know you didn't want to stand up just yet_.

He throws his head back against the couch with a growl. Whatever else she's gone through, at least she's still a wiseass.

Juliet's blue notebook is crammed in between the cushion and the armrest. He wrenches it out so it won't get lost or wrinkled, but once it's in his hand he feels a tingle of temptation. He shakes it off and tosses it onto the coffee table unopened.

* * *

She lied when she said she wasn't angry.

The truth is, she's still so fucking angry about everything that sometimes she doesn't know how to see straight. And that anger had slipped out at least twice yesterday in totally inappropriate ways. But the truth is, she _is_ angry with Rachel. Angry -- illogically, of course -- that Rachel's life hasn't stayed on pause while she waited for Juliet, angry that Rachel is listening to her fiance instead of her sister.

And sure, the logical part of Juliet knows that Rachel and Brian are simply being logical themselves, but she can't understand how to sort through the past two months of her life (or if she's being honest, the past two years or six or twelve) and having to ignore it, to lie about it.

And after she'd had Jonah, her initial wave of grief ridden out, there really had been those three years where things seemed to be working. She had Alice, sometimes there was Nicholas, Jonah was perfect, wonderful, everything. She was obviously more than competent to deal with assorted minor injures, and nothing strayed too far from passable, as long as she avoided thinking about James. But then the war started to get going.

And then there was the day with the keys two years ago, or ninety. (Maybe this should be the next thing she writes about in her blue notebook.)

(Or maybe this should be the next thing she starts trying to forget.)

* * *

James has taken Jonah with him to pick up Clementine, and told her to stay home if she wanted some time to herself, so Juliet sits on the floor in the living room, listening to the day's last trickle of rain. James' laptop is balanced on her knees and her notebook rests open beside her as she makes her latest notation, the first in a half-dozen pages that's simple, cold and clinical: _E.B., d. 8/24/01._

This reset is fucking ridiculous, it's like someone (she doesn't want to wonder who) could just pick and choose what they wanted; of _course_ they'd gotten her to the island that way, she only has one primary set of memories and in them, Ed _had_ died. The son of a bitch who'd used and demeaned her, but then, hasn't her whole life felt at one point or another that someone had been using her for something?

Except for James, she tells herself.

She remembers her note in the book in the basement. Wonders if he noticed. Slides her notebook under the couch. Goes downstairs.

The stairs creak. She turns on the light, pauses to scoop Legos back into the red plastic bin.

The book is at the opposite end of the shelf from where it had been last night, another pale yellow piece of paper tucked between the pages.

He wrote: _I told you time travel's a bitch, didn't I? I'll tell you this though: Even when I didn't remember, I knew something was wrong. I could tell you were missing. You remember that time in the pantry with the cans of beets? One time I found a can of beets here and I threw it into the yard. Didn't know why._

She smiles to herself, or maybe him, and tucks his note into the back pocket of her jeans, tears another page off the pad of paper.

She writes: _I implied I'd never forgotten. That's not true. I couldn't remember for almost four months. I remembered the first time I felt the baby move, and I called for you. After that I went out to the crater where the barracks would be built. That was a really bad day._

* * *

Sure, James had joked around about buying stock in Microsoft back in the '70s, but if he'd invested in Dance Dance Revolution ten years ago, he could have seriously cashed in. He didn't think it was the greatest example to throw money at a problem (i.e., annoying, whiny kids on a crappy afternoon) but he took them down to Target, found a couple new games, and the two of them plus Clementine's friend Emma have been down in the basement for the better part of the afternoon.

He hears a car door slam and Juliet comes into the house a moment later. She'd taken his Jeep just out for the hell of it and now she folds her arms, squints at him. "You need new brake pads," she says.

"What are you, some kinda expert?" he scoffs.

"You don't take it in soon, _then_ you're gonna need rotors. It's not like you wouldn't have a car; you can use mine."

"What, you won't do it for me?" he teases.

She laughs. "We'll need to go to a parts store for the pads, but -- do you have tools?"

"Uh, seriously?"

"Yeah." She gives him a crazy look. "It's not exactly difficult. It's pretty much day one at the motor pool. Besides, I have approximately one career skill left in this life."

"You mean other than being a secret ninja assassin?"

"Left my taser on the island," she says, looking regretful.

"Real ninjas don't need tasers. Hang on," he tells her, and pokes his head down the stairs. "Hey, Fred an' Ginger, we're going out to the garage for a sec," he yells. "And rain's clearing up which means you have about fifteen minutes left before I kick you all out into the yard, K?"

They flee the howls of protest coming from up the stairs. "When did you become such a disciplinarian, anyway?"

"Ah, Clementine's a tough broad just like her ma, give her an inch and she'll take a mile," he shrugs as he opens the door from the kitchen to the attached garage.

"Jonah's been easy. He -- I don't know if it was the time or the place -- or me, but there weren't a lot of choices or distractions, so he just sort of always did what I wanted him to. It wasn't 'don't go out into the jungle because you'll get lost' so much as 'don't go out into the jungle because the smoke monster will kill you,' you know?"

"He told me he saw it."

"The smoke monster liked to follow me around sometimes," she says matter-of-factly.

He does a double-take. "You're kiddin'."

"Nope. Black mark, remember?" She touches her back.

Her words sink in slowly. "Holy shit... So that monster..."

"It's him, yeah. A form of him."

"Why do you think it saved you?" he asks, all pretense of looking for tools gone. They're standing in the semi-darkness of the steamy, humid garage, a sliver of light peaking from underneath the door on the other side.

"Ben made some kind of deal with him. I'm not sure why exactly he wanted to save me so badly considering he disappeared from our camp anyway, not long after. It's not like he saved me to try to stay around me. But I think it created some sort of stalemate in the war."

James shakes his head, not understanding.

She hesitates. "I'm the only one who can talk to both of them. And Jacob owes me. And his brother used to be able to control me."

His heart has skipped about half a dozen beats at this point. "What are you talkin' about?" he mutters.

"Which part?" she says, only half-joking.

"I dunno, any part. Him controlling you."

------ FLASHBACK (1921) ------

Her eyes opened almost involuntarily, tracing patterns on the trees above her. She sat up and her breath hitched, her body instantly devolving into a shiver. She brought her hands to her face in the fading light. It had been over a year since she'd woken up this exact same way, covered in blood, but the blood still seemed to find the exact same way to whirl around the patterns of her fingertips.

She'd been so sure that this would never happen again, it had just been some fluke, some strange lingering effect of her injuries and her memory loss. She'd been working on tracking, though, with Christopher, and she reminded herself she was always good in a crisis (if that's what this was).

There were three sets of tracks this time, and she couldn't remember if they'd been only two sets last time, or if she'd just guessed. None of the three sets seemed to belong to her, though. One set was careful, contained and neat, characteristics she didn't think she would have if she'd been unaware of her actions. Another was obviously supposed to have been covered over, and it was nearly impossible to trace as a result. The last was messy, dirt kicked everywhere and twigs broken, and maybe that could have been hers, but there was no evidence of blood smeared onto any of it. And she had too much blood splattered across her.

She looked up at the tree that had the mark carved into it, the mark so like the one burned into her back, the one that would be a signal to the medical station in the future. Seeing that carving grounded her, calmed her.

In fact, it almost unnerved her how calm she suddenly felt, like the blood and the blackout and the gathering dusk were the least of her problems, until she remembered -- Jonah.

She never was one to lose control, to panic, to scream, but her calm vanished because the last thing she remembered was carrying her 14-month-old son along the edge of their village and where was he, what if he was lost in the jungle, what if _it_ had gotten to him, what if anything had; was he lost, cold, starving, drowning, and she's just screaming, half-screaming his name and half-screaming non-words, she was running in an arbitrary direction for close to five minutes when she ran nearly head-on into Alice -- Alice, holding Jonah! -- and she felt her knees nearly buckle in relief.

"Jules! Jules, oh God, what happened? The blood -- and I found Jonah -- "

Juliet scooped her son out of Alice's arms and checked him over frantically with a shaking hand. "Is he -- where did you -- "

Alice pointed off to the right. "Just 'round there, he was all by himself." Her eyes are round with worry. "Is this like -- the last time?"

She nodded, squeezing her eyes shut, willing the adrenaline to fade. "I didn't think it would happen again, it'd been over a year."

Alice shook her head. "This is bad. This is really bloody bad, Jules. What if I hadn't found the baby? What if ... no, we need to talk to Richard."

"What's he gonna do?" she said flatly. "He doesn't trust me as it is -- I'm lucky he's let me stay this long. Alice, I know this is bad, I get it, but I don't see what good it'll do except for getting me kicked out into the jungle permanently." She bit her lip. Not talking to Ricard didn't really solve anything, either, she knew. "I'm just going to have to make sure I'm never alone if I have Jonah, if we're outside."

Alice gave her a long, serious look. "You could end up being a liability to our entire side if this keeps up, Jules. I love you dearly, you know that, but you know my loyalty is always going to be to this island."

"What exactly are you telling me?" Juliet asked icily.

"Nothing, Jules, but we've got to break this connection or someone, maybe all of us, will end up in serious trouble."

Something sparked in her brain then, like a small, flickering flame hidden away in a back corner. "I'll talk to Jacob," she mutters.

------ END FLASHBACK ------

She explains this all to James as best she can, in the brightened garage after he'd rolled up the door to expose the driveway steaming with evaporating rain, as they're hunting for a tire iron along the crowded wooded shelves along the back wall. How the smoke would follow her, sometimes talk to her. How somehow she knew, just _knew_, she could let the ocean close over her head and open her eyes and Jacob would be there.

"But _how_ did you know that?" he asks insistently. "There has to be a reason you knew that in the first place."

"I don't know, James. I can't remember -- I just can't remember. And are you really asking me to explain the island to you?"

"Well, you were there about four times as long as I was," he quipped.

She feels her face, her heart (just for a moment) turn to stone.

He closes his eyes for a second, cringing. "Jesus Christ, Juliet, I don't know why I just said that. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry."

"James," she says quietly, so quietly that he has to open his eyes to be sure she's talking. She touches his wrist. "It's not your fault."

He shakes his hand, his face contorted with grief. "I don't know why I looked at her Juliet, I swear it. If I coulda done it over, if I'd even been thinking straight -- "

"I know," she says. "I know." She steps closer, draws out a shaky sigh, and wraps her arms around his back.

He's just moving to slide his arms around her waist when Clementine bursts into the garade with a pink cell phone to her ear. They spring apart, not fast enough to avoid a pointed look.

Clementine is yammering away on the phone, gesturing to James. "Yeah. Me too. OK. Bye, Kate.... Hi, Mom. Yeah, he's right here." She holds the phone out to him. "Mom wants to talk to you."


	31. Don't Get Shipwrecked

**Note: The flashback here is set the day after the previous flashback. And it's relevant, I swear! Also, most of this chapter is the Cassidy/James (or should I be calling him Sawyer here?) confrontation. I thought the James/Juliet stuff deserves its own chapter so it'll be separate, but definitely will be up very soon.**

* * *

_"We were anxious to begin our life as people who had no people."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

-------- FLASHBACK (1921) --------

She was halfway to the beach when she stopped. Without turning around, she said, "What do you want, Richard?"

Silence.

She walked for another minute. Then stopped, turned. Glared. Waited.

"Animadvertistine, ubicumque stes, fumum recta in faciem ferri?" Richard asked. Ever noticed how wherever you stand, the smoke goes right into your face? It was supposed to be a rhetorical question, but this time it wasn't.

Her face was a cold stone. "I'm going to the water."

He nodded at the rifle slung over her shoulder. "Where did you get that?"

"Where do you think?" Only four people in their group carried keys to the arsenal: Richard, Alice, Nicholas, David. Juliet and David definitely socialized in different circles; he was essentially Richard's right-hand man. And for the nearly two years she'd been there, the animosity between Richard and Juliet was poorly disguised at best.

"I see you got yourself some pants, as well."

"I'm not traipsing through the jungle in some dress."

"And where did you get those?"

"Same person who gave me the rifle."

"Alice has more important things to do than ensure your comfort."

"Alice can do whatever she wants. It's called free will."

"I don't like her spending so much time with you," Richard said thoughtfully. "It could be threatening to our mission."

"Alice's loyalty is to this island first, not me. She's made that abundantly clear." Juliet ground her teeth together to stifle her anger.

Richard's eyes widened almost imperceptibly, but he recovered quickly (from what? she wondered). He brushed by her and took over the lead, started back on the path to the beach. "Are you coming or not?"

She shifted the rifle to her other shoulder and followed him.

"You know, loyalty is a peculiar thing, Juliet," he said over his shoulder.

"Loyalty's never seemed to do much for me before," she said, wishing that Jack and Kate, _James_ and Kate, hadn't chosen to pop into her head at that moment.

"And now?"

"It's fairly black and white." She smirked and looked away as the truth of that phrase washed over her.

"If people here knew what they were really working for, the balance could shift. And we can't have that, now can we?"

Is that why I have no idea what you're talking about? she thought, and stayed silent.

"Survival," he finally said. "Sacrifice. Loyalty."

She rolled her eyes. John Locke all over again. "You sound exactly like someone you'll know in the future." She chose not to add: _It was a tiny bit annoying coming from him. But it downright sucks hearing it come from you now._

Richard stopped walking for a moment, turned around. He looked grave. "What I'm saying is that survival and loyalty are two very different things here."

Survival versus loyalty. Fine. Whatever.

(She had ditched one in favor of the other, letting go of his hand hovering over oblivion.)

"I could have told you that." She pushed past him and took the lead on the path again, tilted her head. "Are you coming or not?"

------ END FLASHBACK ------

This can NOT be happening. The three of them are just standing in the garage, and Clementine's holding out the phone to him and Juliet's face is frozen solid. James stands motionless, his hand reaching out, gripping the phone, his arm still outstretched. Something flickers in Juliet's eyes and she spins and turns toward the door into the house.

He grabs her wrist as she pushes past him. "Wait -- "

She snatches her hand back. "Don't. _Don't._" She turns and walks. Fast.

_Shit. SHIT. _He remembers to lift the phone to his ear, says as fast as he can, "Cass, I'm gonna have to call ya back." He slams the phone shut before he hears a response, shoves the device into his pocket. Clem's mouth is hanging halfway down to the ground. She doesn't even ask for her phone back, just stares after him.

Juliet's already in the house, halfway up the stairs by now. He takes the steps two at a time, and she spins on the staircase, her face wide open with disbelief. "You know, I was willing to believe there was more than one person in the world with that name until I saw your face."

"They're friends," he says hopelessly. "They were friends before the plane, and after Kate got outta prison -- you know she went to -- ?" Juliet nods, her eyes flashing blue steel. "OK, well, she needed a place to stay durin' her probation and she stayed with Cassidy, got real close to Clem in this set of memories, as well as the one before it. That cruise Cass is goin' on with her friends? Kate's one of 'em."

Clementine comes through the front door, not looking at them, and goes through to the kitchen, thunders down the basement steps back to Jonah and her friend.

"Why didn't you just tell me." Juliet's voice is utterly flat, no inflection.

"I guess sayin' the subject never came up wouldn't cut it, huh?"

She lets out a long, angry, shaky sigh. "You know, I don't know who I'm more disgusted with, you or myself."

He opens his mouth to respond even though he has no words, but the pink phone in his pocket starts to ring with Clementine's stupid pop-sing ringtone.

"Answer the phone, James. Don't let Cassidy get angry." Juliet turns, and he just lets her go. He's convinced they're both thinking the same thing: what a colossal asshole he can be sometimes.

Cringing, he slides the phone from his pocket, watches as she turns the corner. "Yeah."

"You want to tell me what the hell is going on?" Cassidy hisses into the phone. "You have another goddamn _kid_?! Were you ever planning on even telling me this?"

He smacks his forehead into the wall. Shit. Shit. Shit. "Cass, God's honest trust, I never knew 'til three days ago."

"How convenient, then, that five days ago I left town for two entire weeks," she snaps.

"She's been outta the country the whole time, I had no idea."

"Who the hell is this woman? Kate says she knows her."

_Trust Austen to butt her nose in where she don't belong._ "Yeah, and what's Kate say about her?"

"No. I wanna hear what _you_ have to say," Cassidy says."Clementine said she's walking around in a daze half the time, freaking out about something. Said she started shaking at dinner last night for no reason."

_Well, shit. _He has no goddamn clue what Kate did or didn't tell her. He's just gonna have to wing it. "She's been through a lot," James says lamely.

"Like what?" she demands.

He pauses. He used to make shit up for a living, right? And he was good at it then, damn good, got women to part with their money as easily as they'd parted with their panties. "She worked for the State Department. Was on assignment in another country, can't really say where, 'cept that things turned violent. Really bad. She and him just barely got outta there."

"Well, Kate said she was working for Doctors Without Borders."

Doctors Without Borders. That was actually a pretty good one. He wished he'd thought of it. _Goddammit. Stay focused._ "She -- she _was_ working for Doctors Without Borders, but she took another position with the State Department as, uh, a medical advisor."

"And what the hell was she doing in some crazy country if she had a kid?"

"Well, ya know, they lived inside the -- you know, the embassy perimeter or whatever," he says, rolling his eyes at the ceiling. You needed boots to walk around in this bullshit.

"How did you meet even her in the first place?"

He guesses saying she shot me with a taser in the jungle wouldn't cut it. "Through friends."

"Yeah, _which_ friends?"

He says the first names that come into his head. "Sun and Jin."

"From South Korea," Cassidy says skeptically.

"Yeah, what, you want a play-by-play illustration?" he says. "She and Sun met in college as part of a study-abroad program."

"How's Kate know her?"

"She didn't tell ya?"

"So what if she did?"

Why was it that every time Kate thought she was helping, she was just digging a deeper hole? Her heart was in the right place but she just always ended up fucking up everything -- EVERYTHING! Jesus, help like this he didn't did. "What do you wanna know?"

"For starters, what exactly are you planning to do? Clementine said they're staying with you."

"Yeah. She just got back, things were kinda difficult where she been on the East Coast, y'know, thought she should look me up -- "

"I'm sure. Where is she sleeping?" Cassidy says pointedly.

"In my room, and I'm sleepin' in the den. Fold-out couch an' everything."

"Really. And I'm supposed to believe that."

"And what'd you do 'fore you and Rob got married?" Bringing up her ex-husband is a low blow, he knows, considering the ink was barely dry on the court documents.

Cassidy is silent for a moment. Finally she says, "I have a right to know what's going on in the house where my daughter spends half her time."

"Sure ya do. And what's goin' on right now is that Clementine is playin' Dance Dance Revolution for the fifteenth time today with Emma and her brother."

"What do you mean, the fifteenth time?"

_Oh for the love of..._ "It's rainin', it's summer-time, trust me, she's practicin' her clarinet and keepin' up with her summer book list an' all that too. She's fine."

"How long are they staying?"

Ah, that's the million-dollar question, isn't it? "As long as they want to."

Cassidy sighs. "We're getting on the boat tomorrow and I don't know how well my cell is going to work."

"We're gonna be fine."

"What about this -- Juliet, is that her name?"

Shit, wasn't Juliet supposed to be going by her fake name? They're not perpetuating that con well at all. "Uh, yeah. Well, her real name's Leah, it's just Juliet is sort of this nickname -- "

"You know, I don't think I even want to know why. All your friends just have to have nicknames, don't they?"

He can tell she's starting to calm down, relax. "Yeah, it's sorta this thing I do, baby mama."

"Yeah, well, about your other baby mama. She OK? Clementine sounded kind of worried about her, actually."

"She just went through a bunch of freaky stuff over there, I think she's gonna need some time to sort it out." Good thing Cassidy didn't pay much attention to international news.

"Fine. Just don't let her upset Clementine. And take care of that boy if she's having a hard time, for Christ's sake."

"I am."

"Good. Fine. You know, Kate told me to cut you some slack. Said Juliet is a good person, good heart, smart, loyal, you'd loved her a lot, all that crap."

Maybe Kate did know what she was talking about after all. "Yeah."

"OK. Don't fuck it up, then. You want to talk to Kate?"

He did, actually, to find out what Kate had told Cassidy, but now was not exactly the right time for that sort of thing. And if he could cut some sort of deal where he never talked to Kate ever again, if that amazing incredible woman upstairs would just talk to him once, ONCE more -- he would take that deal in a heartbeat. "Naw, it's OK. Tell her I said don't get shipwrecked nowhere."


	32. Feathers

**OK, folks, I totally lied when I said this would be 40 chapters, FYI. It's going to be a lot longer and I hope you're all all right with that! My outline is basically bursting at the seams by now. And I do take "requests" into account, in case you haven't noticed, although sometimes it takes me a while to get around to them organically. So please comment away at will!**

* * *

_"I wondered if I would spend the rest of my life inventing complicated ways to depress myself."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

Sequestered in the privacy of James' bedroom, she stews and paces past the windows, watching late-afternoon sun finally peaking out behind the clouds. James' voice is just barely audible over the stairs, although she can't make out individual words, just the overall defensive tone of his voice.

She feels like a colossal bitch, a complete mess, the queen of naivety. Letting all those old insecurities spill over in front of him and his daughter.

So Jack had used and forgotten her, flitted off with Kate and left Juliet to rot on that island for all he'd apparently cared. So what. So she'd watched the pillar of smoke pour from the destroyed freighter, the sweet sting of Dharma rum rolling over her tongue like the tide. So what. So she'd worried and mourned and he was off perpetuating lies and proposing to Kate, only returning his thoughts to the island when his own new life threatened to implode. So what.

Because despite getting left behind, she'd been happy, and if she wanted to be truthful, she'd been happier in the '70s than any other time in her life. Their simple little life, that laughably weird island hippie commune, their science experiment of a healthy relationship. James had been happy too, he'd picked her a yellow fucking flower for God's sake, she'd never thought such a tough-acting conman could go so ridiculously sappy, and then_ they _had come back and she'd let her insecurities hijack _everything._

So she'd started remembering Edmund's string of affairs, the old innumerable hurts of constantly being second-best. So James had called Kate "Freckles." So he'd _looked_ at Kate. So _what_. Juliet went and detonated a fucking hydrogen bomb.

She could have killed hundreds of people for all she'd known or cared. Sure, by the time she was down in that pit she was convinced the plan would work, the reset would happen, but if it hadn't? Either way, at least she would have put James out of the misery she'd seen etched on his face as he clutched her hand with everything he had. The moment before she let go, she finally knew, knew beyond a doubt that he really did love her, that the past was just the past (but now she hated thinking about what past and future really meant, after all -- considering).

And so she'd blown up the bomb, and it turned out she had sent everyone home to second lives, prison or adopted babies or alcoholism or life again after death, or houses in Oregon, and she got to play G.I. Joe with a bunch of time-traveling warriors and science geeks and native weirdos in the jungle. And everything she was tricked into doing, the feel of the bushes over her back as she lay in wait with a rifle, the day they attacked the people coming from the Black Rock. And the day Richard waited for her on the beach while she opened her eyes underwater and heard _Well well well.... _And the day with the keys, when the worst thing she ever did was take four steps to the right.

James hadn't even felt comfortable enough to tell her that Kate and Cassidy were friends. If she completely believed him, and for some reason she did, that's all it was. Logically she understands that if he'd wanted to be with Kate, he'd had ample time -- years, really -- to make that happen. And James has been wonderful to her the entire time she's been here: patient, understanding, never demanding more than she could give.

(She feels like she's trying to prove this is all leading up to something meaningful.)

She's still angry with him for not telling her sooner, but she knows she's angrier with herself.

When she and Rachel were little, their father used to tell them all sorts of riddles. One day, they were lying on their fuzzy orange blanket with the unraveled hem that they always shared, instead of towels, as they were drying out at the beach. As she'd watched the water droplets on her arms shrinking in the sun, their dad had said to them, "OK, here's one. Would someone rather be crushed by a ton of feathers or a ton of bricks?"

"A ton of feathers!" she'd said.

"No, a ton is a ton, stupid," Rachel had announced smugly. "It doesn't matter."

"That's right, Rach," their father had said. "But don't call your sister stupid."

"Yes, it does! It does matter," Juliet had insisted. "A ton of bricks would squash you right away. A ton of feathers would squash you so slowly, you might not even notice it."

They'd both disagreed with her. And she hadn't really cared at the time.

But now as Juliet thinks about it, this is what comes to her mind: Maybe all that metal scaffolding at the Swan site equaled bricks, and her anger and insecurity are feathers. But a ton is still a ton, and it'll crush you in the end after all.

* * *

James snaps the phone closed after hanging up with Cassidy and creeps the rest of the way up the stairs, turns his head toward the closed bedroom door. Silence. As he stands there wondering what to do, he gets the distinct sense he's being watched. He turns around, and Jonah's standing on the landing staring up at him.

"Well, hey there, shortstack," he says with false cheer as he walks back down the stairs. "What's happenin'?"

"Clementine said to get you 'cause we need teams. She wants to do girls against boys."

"That so? She knows I don't do that Dance Dance stuff. Think she's tryin' to con you."

"No, it's for a driving game, James," Jonah says very seriously. "Something cart."

"OK, yeah, Mario Kart." But there was the James thing again. He'd told the kid he could start calling him Dad whenever he wanted, and he knew these things took time -- hell, they'd only met two days ago. But every time he hears it, it feels like little a jab in the ribs, telling him exactly how much of this kid's life he's already missed. "Well, seein' as I'm the only one playin' who actually knows how to drive, you should feel pretty lucky you're gettin' paired up with me," he says dramatically, and scoops Jonah up over his shoulder, fireman-style, to be rewarded with a squeal of laughter.

He completely caves and lets them spend the rest of the afternoon on video games, hoping that Emma's parents don't get pissed at him. But they'd just gotten the new Wii 3 last month and an afternoon in front of a Nintendo console never killed anyone, right? After a couple hours he escapes, using the need-to-start-dinner excuse, but when he comes up the stairs the first thing he sees is Juliet draining pasta into a colander over the sink.

"What are you doin'?"

She takes a step back from the sink as the steam from the boiling water escapes into the air. Turns around and looks at him sheepishly. "I thought we were doing pasta and chicken tonight. You were downstairs." She shrugs.

He knows he should probably just shut the hell up and start setting the table. But dammit, he just can't help himself. "You ain't mad?"

"I think I'm more mad at myself for overreacting." She pours the pasta back into the pot, reaches for the olive oil.

"You had every reason for gettin' mad. I should have told you."

"So why didn't you? Do you have something to hide?"

"Nothin' more than I already told you, if that's what you're gettin' at."

"So you didn't tell me because you were afraid I'd act exactly the way I did this afternoon."

He considers this, grinning a little at the fact that she's just standing in the kitchen clutching a potholder, looking confused and embarrassed. "Actually I thought it'd be worse."  
But then he thinks again. Obviously he knows all about her old insecurities, being second-best, although it had always seemed brutally unfair to him. Here was this amazing, intelligent, gorgeous woman who had all these hang-ups about never being good enough, and it had just astounded him that it was all thanks to a series of total assholes who'd destroyed her self-esteem. And frankly, it had always astounded him that she'd _let_ them. And then Kate had come back and he had played right into all that bullshit, never thought about what she must have been feeling until it was already too late.

She leans against the counter, not returning his smile, serious, intent, her head cocked to the side. "Is there anything I should know about you and Kate after the reset?"

"No," he says simply, and it's the truth. Sure, he'd met Kate in the second set of memories, even before they remembered each other, and he'd thought she was cute, but she was Cassidy's friend and that was that. And the morning in 2007 when he'd woken up and instantly remembered everything, _everything_, and found his face still purple from that fight with the doc? Not five minutes later, Kate had called him, and that's when he'd thrown his cell phone across the goddamn room. No way was he getting sucked down into that fucking vortex of futility ever again.

Juliet is still watching him, not quite expressionless and yet not laying down all the cards, either. She nods, just once. "Could you go outside and check the chicken on the grill? It should be done by now."

Seriously, that was it? He has never been so glad to go look at chicken in his entire life.

* * *

The one thing that keeps running through her head is how normal this all seems. They hardly see Clementine at the outdoor movie, she's running around with her friends mostly pretending like she doesn't know them, going to the concession stand for popsicles with Jonah, and they've got their lawn chairs set up near some of James' "old geezer" parent friends. It's almost laughable to believe that not a month ago people were shooting at her while she was trying to untangle a stupid jungle conspiracy with her time-traveling adult son.

She remembers again the conversation she'd had with Jonah, the grown-up version, the day he'd shown up on the island, when they'd talked about going to movies. It just feels like some perfect circle has closed, or opened, like the night she'd made him promise to never go to the island when she'd already seen him there as an adult. _What a weird life._

"You all right?" James whispers to her, and she realizes she hasn't been paying attention to the movie.

She looks at him through the darkness, the images from the screen flickering across his face. She smiles. "Yeah."


	33. Early

**I just want to say thank you to all the readers/commenters who have been supporting me through writing this, and especially to the always-awesome eyeon, Mad Steph, Kaydence Rei, im so lost, Timeloopy, Aurora 1020, teh-Sara, D.D. Casale and makealist.**

* * *

_"He reached around and pulled me down onto his back and I lay there, like on the warm sand of a beach. Just that. That is all there is. That is the whole point of everything."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

James wakes, disoriented, in a living room bathed in watery blue light. A cramp pulses between his shoulder blades. It's somewhere in the middle of the night on the living room couch and slowly he realizes the weight on the right side of his body is Juliet's sleeping form, the muted TV screen casting flickering light across her face.

He reaches out to the coffee table and punches the power button on the remote, and the room blinks into welcome darkness. He remembers, now: After they'd come home from the movie and the kids had gone to sleep, he'd made her tea, trying to come up with a remedy for her sleep issues, and they'd sat on the couch clutching steaming mugs and watching MSNBC -- as she'd said, "for the laughs." Juliet was still catching up to current events and he wasn't a great help there, unsure how many terms the current president had served in the state legislature or what the name of the guy was in Afghanistan.

Maybe the tea worked, or maybe it was coincidence, but in the semi-darkened room he'd watched the time between her blinks grow longer and longer, her eyelids finally dropping closed somewhere around 1 a.m. Part of him thinks they'd stayed up on purpose, not wanting to leave each other but not wanting to face potential awkwardness over their sleeping arrangements like in those first few months in Dharma. So he watched her sleep for a long while.

And part of him had wanted to wake her and tell her to go upstairs; another part wanted to scoop her into his arms and place her gently on his bed and pull the covers over both of them. But he was scared of breaking the spell, and so he'd found a blanket from the hall closet and draped it around her shoulders. She'd shifted slightly when he'd done this, her eyelids twitching furiously; she'd already been captured into a dream.

He reached down and nudged her feet a little, pushing them up toward the couch, and she unconsciously followed his guide and dragged her legs onto the cushions in her sleep. Well, great. She was sleeping, covered, as comfortable as she was gonna get on the couch, but now what? He didn't want to go upstairs and leave her. Maybe he could run just one tiny little con on her, pretend he'd fallen asleep too.

Oh, the hell with it. So he'd sat back down on the couch, near her feet, and removed her shoes and then his own. They were both too tall to be comfortably sharing this couch, but it'd never stopped them in Dharma and that couch was smaller and way crappier than this one. So he'd taken as much of the couch as he'd dared without jostling her too much, and eased an edge of the blanket across him, and that was that.

Now he watches her in the thin glimmer of moonlight coming through the windows. She's no longer dreaming, curled so still she looks like a photo, a memory, but she's real, she's warm and she's right here. He closes his eyes and dreams.

* * *

OK, so Juliet hadn't _really_ fallen asleep on the couch. Or, more accurately, she'd _purposely_ fallen asleep on the couch. Their spontaneous shared nap that morning had been so comforting, so accidental (and the part where they'd woken up hadn't been so bad, either). And tonight she hadn't wanted to leave him, split up into their separate rooms, but she also didn't want to suggest anything that could sound too forward when she still didn't know quite what she -- or they? -- were up to, exactly.

He'd provided the perfect excuse by suggesting she try chamomile tea that night to help her sleep. They'd sat in his living room with the news on; he'd cracked some joke about how she must be shocked the president was no longer "Silent Cal" Coolidge, and she'd faked outrage over how he'd felt compelled use even poor old Calvin's nickname but she got only a mere (and rather lame, in her opinion) "blondie" every now and then.

Sure, she'd been a little tired, but she's always hated chamomile tea. When she finally closed her eyes somewhere around 1 a.m., she'd felt him turn his head to watch her. First she felt self-conscious and almost wanted to pop her eyes open and scare the living daylights out of him. She almost wanted to laugh at him, the conman conned.

But after a few minutes, her breathing did even out and she dropped into sleep after all. And in her dream, someone was covering her with a blanket.

Hours later, she stirs in the now-dark living room to discover a blanket covering both of them. Her head is on his chest, his arm draped across her waist with his hand resting on her ribs.

Was this what she'd been hoping for all along? Both of them seemed afraid to navigate the question of room arrangements, or what might happen behind closed doors. The ache in her lower back reminds her there's still a perfectly good bed upstairs, but she knows at this hour the floor would be cold under her bare feet, and the bed even colder, so she snuggles closer to the warmth that is James, and her eyes close again.

* * *

He wakes again thinking how ferociously thirsty he is, but realizes his dry tongue is caused by a mouthful of hair. He sputters and coughs, reaching up to push her curls out of his face just as she shifts and moves her head, smoothing her hair out of his face.

"Sorry," she whispers sheepishly.

"I can think of worse ways to wake up," he whispers back, and a slow smile spreads sleepily across her face. The room is bathed in pink morning light.

"No cat this morning," Juliet says quietly, triumphantly. Fakes a pretty decent evil eyebrow arch.

"She's probably sprawled out in the middle of that bed like the damn Queen of Sheba."

Neither of them are trying to make excuses for falling asleep on the couch last night, he realizes. Neither of them are acting like they didn't know why. Frankly, his back is killing him at this point, he feels like an old man right now, one who can't handle a long night on a shared couch, but he'll be damned if he voices one word of complaint. Because despite the ache of his muscles, he really has nothing to complain about.

Except she shifts and lets out a low groan. "My neck hurts," she mutters, reaching up under her hair.

"What, sleepin' all night on my chiseled chest not relaxin' enough for you?" he teases her.

She laughs. "No complaints there, but I'm realizing I must be too old to share a couch for an entire night."

"_You're_ too old? No way. Now me, _I'm_ too old. My back is killin' me."

She sits up, looking a little reluctant to do so, and smiles. "You're always going on about how old you are, but you look just the same to me."

"So is this where I point out, oh, I dunno, this?" He points to the gray that's slowly been creeping into the hair at his temples.

She shakes her head. "I think it looks good. Now, if you start pointing out my crows' feet, I _will_ have to find my taser again."

"You don't got crows' feet," he says, reaching up to touch the delicate skin by her eyes. "You look just the same."

She blushes and shakes her head. "No."

He sits up. "You look just the same. Better, even. Better than I could ever have imagined." They're both sitting now, him at the end of the couch, her in the middle, her bent knees touching his thighs. She blushes again, his hand still on her face, and despite the fact that they've just been talking about gray hair and crows' feet, this somehow seems like the perfect time to kiss her again.

She leans into him as their lips meet and he hears an almost-musical sigh at the back of her throat, like she's been waiting for this, just this, and she catches his lower lip between hers, nibbling gently on it as she gives him a mischievous grin. Oh, two can play at this game. So he slides his other hand into her hair, deepens the kiss, and is rewarded with another one of those perfect sighs.

Somewhere in the back of his head he remembers they're not alone in this house, but he knows they'll hear footsteps on the stairs as an ample warning as long as they stay dressed, and belatedly he realizes her fingers are knotted into his hair, and his hands are creeping under her shirt, finding the perfect warm skin he's so remembered and missed.

She's kissing his throat and he can't remember anymore how or why they could possibly want to stop. "Upstairs," he pants, and she looks at him dazed, like she can't remember what to do, and then she is tugging at his hands and drags him off the couch.

They're scampering up the stairs like children on Christmas morning headed the opposite direction, when the door to the center bedroom bursts open and Jonah looks at them sleepily. "I'm hungry," he mumbles.

Juliet looks at James, horrified, and he knows the expression on her face must match his. Juliet's opening and closing her mouth like a goldfish out of water, and finally James musters up, "Are you absolutely _sure_?"

The kid nods.

Juliet remembers how to speak. "Um. OK, buddy, can you go downstairs and we'll be right there? There are juice boxes in the fridge."

"Yeah."

They watch him go, their faces frozen. She's sliding her eyes sideways at him and he growls. "Remind me again why I had kids."

Juliet laughs. "I was going to remind you of the _exact_ reason why, but I guess that'll have to wait until later."


	34. The Loophole

_"It wasn't the mystery of language we needed revealed, it was mystery itself, before language, still draped in the mists."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

------- FLASHBACK (1921) ------

Richard didn't try to take the lead on the path again, which was fortunate because Juliet was one second of aggravation away from punching him in the jaw. He'd been such a sanctimonious suspicious asshole to her since her arrival two years earlier, and she'd had enough.

What exactly was she even doing? All she knew was that she needed to talk to Jacob, and the water was involved, and some utterly blank instinct was taking over from there. She walked quickly, looking straight ahead. Richard didn't try to talk to her again and she wouldn't have responded if he had.

As they emerged from the treeline, she was already kicking off her shoes. Barely refrained from throwing them at Richard's head. Hey, he was immortal, it wasn't like he couldn't take it. She unlooped the strap of the rifle from her shoulder and extended it to him, challenging him with an icy gaze. He took the rifle.

He was at the edge of her heels all the way across the beach.

Her feet met wet sand, and she spun and glared at him. "Are you planning on _watching?_"

Richard turned his palms up. "What else would you like me to do?"

"I wasn't planning on walking back in wet clothes," she snapped. "I would appreciate a little privacy."

Richard nodded and walked halfway back up the sand. She stood and watched his retreating form until she was satisfied he was keeping his back to her. She slipped out of her clothes and plunged into the warm water, swimming in even strokes until she knew she'd be well over her head.

In the moment before she ducked under, she faced the shore. Richard had turned and was watching her expressionlessly. She met his gaze for a moment before closing her eyes and ducking under.  
She blinked into the blue-green light of ocean water and knew she wouldn't need to breathe for a long, long time.

_Well, well, well._

_Hello, Jacob._

_You've come back at last._

_Back?_

_You don't remember, do you._

_How did I know where to find you._

_All the questions in eternity and that's what you ask._

_What are you talking about._

_I'm not talking at all._

_You're the ocean now._

_Ben killed me. Across all times I should be gone. But here I am._

_Did the plane still crash._

_That's nothing._

_Tell me._

_I am. The plane is nothing._

_Did. We. Reset. Time._

_In a manner of speaking._

_Where is James._

_James is not why we're here._

_What do you want from me._

_To thank you._

_For what._

_What you did saved my life._

_Some life._

_Oh, you'd be surprised._

_What about your brother._

_Yes, he is a bit of a problem, isn't he. He's been bothering you._

_I black out._

_And you do things._

_I guess so._

_Bad things._

_I guess so._

_You don't want to, do you._

_No, of course not._

_And you're worried about your son._

_Stay away from him. Both of you. Stay away, do you hear me._

_We don't speak to him._

_Just stay away from him._

_I can't answer for my brother. Just myself._

_Why did I know how to find you._

_You don't remember at all. I must say, I'm disappointed._

_Am I supposed to feel sorry for you. Because I don't._

_I wouldn't expect you to._

_And you owe me, don't you. I saved you._

_Yes._

_Repay me by getting us home._

_Silly thing. I can't do that._

_What can you do._

_Did you know you can't be killed._

_Don't change the subject. No. I didn't know that._

_That's why he's using you. You can't be killed. And you're the loophole we needed._

_What loophole. Why._

_He's getting you to do things for him. He thinks you're his. All his. But in the end you will only work for me. He thinks he's using you against me. In time, it will reverse. He does not know this yet._

_Can you make him stop using me._

_I'll talk to him._

_Make him stop. You owe me._

_I will._

_Promise._

_I promise._

_So I really can't be killed._

_There are people trying to change things so you can._

_Fantastic._

_They think that they will bring you to a point where I won't want you anymore. Where you're so damaged, I will allow you to be killed._

_Will they. Will you._

_Probably not._

_Tell me I'm not going to be like Richard._

_No. You just have something to do. So your reward, for now, is life._

_Some reward._

_Enjoy it, Juliet._

_Fuck off, Jacob._

_Strong words, Juliet. I know you're bluffing. You've never wanted your life so much as you do now. You want to be here for your son._

_Fine. I'm bluffing. But you can't let anything happen to him. That you have to promise me._

_People are just pawns, you know. They complicate things._

_You owe me. Your brother owes me._

_I'd say you owe him, actually. You saved my life. But he saved yours. Quite the dilemma._

_If I have something to do, fine. Tell me what to do and I'll do it._

_I already told you._

_No you didn't._

_You just don't remember._

_So tell me again. Tell me now._

_If I told you now, you'd want to do it now. It's the human way. Impatience. But it's not time yet. When you remember, then it will be time._

_Don't you dare talk to me about time._

_This is turning into a rather unproductive conversation._

_I've had a rather unproductive two years._

_Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis._

_All things are changing, and we are changing with them._

_Yes, of course._

_So we wait._

_Yes, of course. But, Juliet._

_What._

_Do try to remember what you need to do. I can't tell you again._

Somehow she knew it was time to breathe. It had all happened in seconds. It had all happened in a flash. She broke the surface, her breathing even, and looked out across the sand.

Richard was sitting at the treeline, his elbows resting on his bent knees, fingers clasped, his pants still perfectly creased. The utter shock on his face widened her eyes.

She swam slowly, pausing every few strokes to wipe the thin stream of blood running from her nose. Richard met her at the tide with her clothes, respectfully looking away as she rose from the water.

"I was wrong about you," he said gently.  
She dressed without speaking, feeling damp sand shifting beneath her bare feet, her clothes clinging to wet skin. Her eyes burned from the salt of the ocean.

They were walking up the beach when her knees weakened and she sat abruptly. Richard knelt beside her, lightly touching her shoulder. Juliet didn't react, looking out at the water, wrapping her arms around bent knees. Richard twisted and sat. He said nothing, waited for her.

Juliet watched the tide rolling out. The taste of salt water lingering on her tongue. Her eyes burning and burning. She felt the sand beneath her and tried to remember the grind of pavement under high heels, the hum of a car engine. The buzz of a dial tone, the chime of an incoming e-mail. The jagged edge of a house key pressing into her palm. Highways stretching out for miles, shiny silver guardrails lacing over the earth.

(She tried to think of James and Rachel as little as possible.)

"I'm going to be here forever," she whispered.

------- END FLASHBACK ------

The instant the automatic doors swallow her up, she's thinking this is a mistake. James had teased and goaded her into going, and she's standing next to an accordioned rack of red plastic shopping carts watching Saturday morning shoppers, families with toddlers in tow. It seems like everyone who's shopping alone is wearing white earbuds or those tiny silver boomerangs, the wireless cellphone devices. No one wants to face silence or solitude.

At the house they're out of cereal and she wants better coffee and she needs some long-sleeved shirts because nights are so cool here, and maybe sneakers if she wants to go running again without getting blisters, and good lord, a decent jogging bra. And it's all just _here_. Just here, in endless rows, right here, so normal.

There are signs hanging overhead for each aisle and she closes her eyes in a moment of sensory overload. They'd just had to joke about Target, turned it into some pointless running joke, and she feels a surge of anger at herself, for being so hesitant to accept that part of real life is going to the store when the cereal runs out.

(On the island she'd stopped allowing herself to want anything, and that's how life became bearable again.)

* * *

After Jonah's in bed, she finds James in the living room, reading with his feet up on the coffee table. She sits down silently, her body angled toward him. She waits until he's looking right at her, and then she gently takes the book from his hands.

(He cannot stop kissing her.)

* * *

Clementine is mercifully sleeping over at Maddie's tonight, and James had purposely taken the boy down the hill to the basketball courts. Juliet had given him a strange look at that. "You hate basketball," she reminded him. "At least I played in high school."

"Yeah, and I keep tellin' you that 'til I see photographic evidence, I ain't got no proof of that, twinkle toes."

She'd tried to fake a pout. "You really do come up with the lamest nicknames for me. I mean, blondie, wiseass. Seriously? I'm not coming out of this any better than the cat."

"Now you leave Cat outta this. She ain't done nothin' to you except try to cop a feel while you were sleeping."

"Yeah, and I wonder where she learned that from." Jules had arched an eyebrow. "I know what you're doing, James," she'd said coolly.

James had totally lost his train of thought when he'd thought about that whole 'copping a feel' thing. "Uh... What?"

She smirked. "Go on, get him all tired out so he falls asleep early. I see through your ruse. You're losing your edge, Mr. Con Man."

"Yeah, now who's giving out the lame nicknames?" he'd teased, and she'd swatted him with her blue notebook.

Now he's pulling her up the stairs with both hands like she'd been doing to him this morning. She's already trying to unbutton his shirt and he's trying to help her, but walking backward up the stairs and trying to remove an overly complicated article of clothing doesn't leave much left for balance and he stumbles a little, pulling her down into his lap.

Normally they would probably have laughed at something like that, but this is beyond awkward laughter, and instead of pulling him back up, she pauses and grinds her hips into him, leaving him to swallow a groan he feels growing in the back of his throat. He cannot stop kissing her. He's got a thumb in the hollow behind her left earlobe with the other hand exploring somewhere much less innocent when she catches her breath and finally manages to pull them both to their feet. "Up," she pants.

"Already am," he retorts, and she smirks at him.

"Lucky me," she says, and drags him behind closed doors.

* * *

Once they're behind closed doors she feels an unexpected surge of panic. It's been so long and she's still sorting out whatever the hell is going on in her head and past and future, and her mind isn't as delightfully blank as she'd been hoping it would be. (_Everyone just dies or leaves or gets left behind._) He presses her up against the door, kissing her, his hands cupping her ass, but she thinks suddenly of things she'd rather forget, but he's tugging at the hem of her shirt and she instinctively raises her arms over her head.

She knows this is what she wants. And it has been _so long_. It has been so long since she'd even let herself to think she'd ever see him again. And she's afraid, so afraid, of even trying once more to seek refuge in another person.

But this_ isn't_ 'another person,' this is James, she knows him, or knew him or maybe does again or she will, and he'd once understood everything about her and maybe someday he will again if she can ever figure out how to tell him. He smells the same and feels the same and kisses the same, and it doesn't matter there's been other people between them and all that's grown up in the interim, and she feels her mind finally clearing.

She takes his hands and leads him to the bed, his bed her bed maybe their bed sometime after this. They don't say much of anything, but he's got her eyes in his as he unclasps her bra and she feels a smile spring uninvited to her face. He's kissing her neck and she stretches out against him and closes her eyes, her arms around him and her palms pressed against his skin, tracing circles on his lower back. She feels his warm lips tracing a trail down her throat until he reaches her collarbone, the place he's always loved to kiss so much and she feels his lips against her scar, she'd forgotten about it and she stiffens. Opens her eyes. _Don't. _It's unspoken.

He pulls back slightly, sitting up, watching her, his eyes dark. He swallows. He's scared. She's scaring him.

She sits up too, pushes her hair back. Her lips part as she tries to figure out what she's supposed to say.

But she doesn't want to say anything. She just needs to take control suddenly, and it's he knows exactly what she's up to, and with a flashing grin he lets her. "You're looking a bit overdressed compared to me," she whispers.

When he's finally inside of her, his hands grasping her hips, she leans down and presses her forehead against his.

_Tell me this will all be OK,_ she says without speaking.

_It will be,_ he replies.


	35. Stay

_"One thing I could do was pray. I prayed while I looked into his eyes, and my prayer was Hello, hello, hello."_

_-_- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

She wakes to the sound of rain splattering against the windows and feels her life twitch on its axis.

The room is dim in early morning, the clouds too heavy to cut through, but the bed is so warm and the rafted ceiling seems so high, so high. She looks up, waiting for something to be taken back, something to push her or pull her away. She feels her thudding heart calming from whatever nightmare had woken her as she realizes there's no nightmare here, not now, not here.

James shifts slightly, still sleeping, and she moves slightly to curl her body back against his.

* * *

When he wakes up she's dead to the world, sprawled out on her stomach with both hands over her head like she's surrendering to something. She'd twitched and fretted through a handful of nightmares last night, more than he'd been witness to during their previous night together on the couch.

Now he hesitates, wanting (_needing_) to kiss her between her shoulder blades down to the small of her back and wake her up properly before the boy is up and going for another day. But he doesn't want to disturb her from sleep. Being all mature and unselfish fucking sucks sometimes, he thinks. And then, _Oh screw it._

He starts kissing the space between her shoulder blades, that spot that seems to be driving him crazy this morning, and she shifts slightly and sighs in her sleep. He watches through the hair that's fallen in front of his face as she turns her head to the side. Her eyelids flutter open and she smiles sleepily at him. He stops what he'd been doing and inches up to meet her face, drops his head so they share the same pillow.

She's watching his face despite her sleepy eyes, forming and dismissing thoughts he's not privileged to be able to read on her face. "I'm really back?" she says sleepily, blinking, confused, and he realizes maybe she's not as awake as he'd thought.

"You're really back," he reassures her. In her sleep, she sweeps out her hand and finds his.

* * *

As she's stirring pancake batter with Jonah later that morning, she catches him smirking at her. She smirks right back, then blushes and looks away. She'd managed to wake him up again in the naughtiest way possible, and now even he feels his face getting red, and he coughs and gets really busy pouring juice.

The front door thunks open and Clementine drops her backpack on the floor.

"Hey there Sleepin' Beauty, how was Maddie's?"

Clem's eyes bounce from Juliet at the counter back to James. "Fine."

"We're makin' pancakes. You wanna throw your backpack upstairs and we'll be ready to eat in a few?"

She shakes her head. "I already ate. Can I go to Emma's?"

"You just got back."

"Yeah but Emma invited me and Maddie over to go swimming if the weather gets better and it's _Sunday_. And _Maddie's_ going."

He knows exactly what she's doing, avoiding them, and he wants to tell her no, but what good is that supposed to do, anyway? Juliet's making herself look unnecessarily busy, meticulously measuring out a teaspoon of vanilla extract, eyes focused on the unimportant task at hand. "Fine."

"Where are my purple sneakers?"

"You think I been up all morning catalogin' your possessions? They're wherever you left 'em."

Juliet doesn't take her eyes from the counter. "They're in the living room under the coffee table."

Clementine darts a murderous look to the back of Juliet's head. "Thanks," she mutters, and clatters upstairs.

He tries to fake cheerfulness. "Looks like someone got up on the wrong side of the bed this mornin'."

"I'm in her way," Juliet says softly, turning from the counter.

"Don't go sayin' that."

"You said it yourself, James. This house was her refuge. You've always been here for her despite whatever else was going on."

"And I still am. It ain't like I ran off to Vancouver or somethin'."

"Maybe we should just get out of your hair for awhile," she hedges. "Rachel's probably wondering if I'm ever coming back."

_Shit._ "Listen, you can do whatever you want, I ain't keepin' you here, but don't leave just 'cause a seventh grader got all hormonal on you. 'Cause that's probably gonna keep happening."

"I hated all the women my dad introduced me to," Juliet says, regret coloring her words.

"Anyone ever show up to make you get over it?"

She shrugs. "Not really. I went off to college and then he was in the accident, you know?"

"Not exactly a ringin' endorsement, is it?"

"Not really."

"You ever wonder what will happen if nothing else gets in the way?"

"Something always gets in the way, James. That's not the island. That's life."

"Well, thanks a lot, Kierkegaard, you're awfully philosophical for 9 a.m."

"You're getting better with the nicknames, at least."

* * *

When he gets back from driving Clementine to Emma's after breakfast, he finds Jonah sprawled out on his stomach in the living room, coloring. Juliet's sitting on the floor with her back against the wall, her cell phone on the floor. She's absently doodling with one of Jonah's crayons in the margins of her blue notebook. At first he thinks it's nothing but geometric angles, but then he sees they're keys, keys in all sizes and shapes.

"My sister's left me some messages," she says hesitantly, and closes the notebook.

"You haven't called her back yet?"

She shakes her head. "I don't know what to tell her."

He drops his car keys on the floor next to her and sits down. "I think she believes you now. At least she seemed to believe me after her interrogation the other day."

"Thank you for doing that, by the way."

"Wait a sec, I had a choice?" he teases her, and she smirks.

"My people were never big on pointing out there were actually choices, huh?"

He thinks of Ben's lame-ass pacemaker con. "Nope. OK, listen. Call your sister. Tell her whatever. Tell her about going to the movies or the fact that there seems to be an 11-year-old here who wants to kick your ass to the curb. Whatever you want. You can keep it light, I don't think she'll press you this time."

She looks at him skeptically. "What makes you say that?"

He figures it wouldn't help to tell her about the conversation he'd had with Rachel yesterday when he'd found Juliet's phone left unattended. Maybe she'd see it as betraying her trust. But he'd wanted, _needed,_ to just make one little thing easier for her. Just one thing. "I just think she's gonna go easier on you from now on."

She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. "OK."

He darts a kiss on the side of her face, low beside that same ear she'd just touched. "Listen, I gotta call into work. There's somethin' down in the basement when you got time."

"James, at this point, time is pretty much all I have," she replies, but she's smiling as she says it.

* * *

She goes to the basement and slides the book from the shelf. Unfolds the note inside it. Thinks about the night on the dock all those years ago. Two weeks.

_I asked you to stay once and you did. I don't think I have any right to ask you again, considering how that turned out in the end. I know you have your sister waiting for you in Miami, and if you want to go back, I'll accept that. And I'm not going to ask you to stay. But I WANT to ask you to stay. Just wanted to put that out there._

* * *

He's out back on the phone. She sits on the chaise lounge, waits for him. When he hangs up, he turns to her, his face defeated, the little boy who never expected anyone to love him ever again. She wonders how everyone can just fall right back into their old patterns so easily.

She leans back and crosses her legs. "You know, I've been wondering something."

"What?" he says nervously.

"How was it, exactly, that you got me to go from two weeks to three years?"

"I been wonderin' the same thing for years."

"So you really don't know?"

"Nope."

She rolls her eyes at him, reaches out her hand to him. She swings her legs back onto the ground and he sits down next to her, looks at her nervously. "You're really going to make me say it?"

"Yep."

"It's because leaving you never seemed like that good of an option. You know, compared to the alternative."

"You know, I'm sure I coulda learned Korean from Jin over time," he says, a little shakily. "We coulda talked to Miles' dead people in all sorts of foreign languages."

"Yeah," she says, mock-seriously. "I could definitely see the appeal in that."

He takes her hand. "I don't wanna pressure you or force you to make decisions you ain't ready to make. But Clem's gonna go off to college eventually and then we could move, you know, anywhere."

"With my luck we'd end up in Alaska." She grins.

"Y'know, I hear hunting moose ain't all that different from huntin' boar."

"Great. Have fun with that."

James laughs. "Can I ask you somethin'? Something I been wonderin'?"

She nods.

"Uh... You know that time..."

Juliet raises an eyebrow. "You're the most inarticulate librarian I've ever met. I think you're conning me about your so-called career."

"Well, maybe I coulda been on one of those poker shows on cable, but _someone_ wasn't real generous about teachin' me the perfect poker face."

"One of the most tightly guarded secrets of my people," she says in her Supremely Creepy Other Brainwashing Voice, before dissolving into a grin. "Fine. Go on."

"Well, thanks for playin' along with the home version, Vanna," he says. "OK. You remember that time... You were workin' late, had to fix that van for Horace's little trip around to the North Valley the next mornin'? And I went over to the motor pool to bring you some dinner and...?"

She throws her head back and laughs. "Are you asking me what I think you're asking me?"

He nods, looking embarrassed.

She struggles to get her laughter under control, failing miserably. "I do think the timing worked out."

"Oh crap, you think?"

"Yeah," she answers, trying to wipe the tears from the corners of her eyes.

"That ain't right," he says. "Our poor kid, conceived in a Dharma van. He ain't never gonna live down the shame." Finally her giggles die down, and he takes her hand. "So?"

"So?"

"What about what I wrote?"

He hadn't needed to write that note, but she's glad he did. She wonders what it is that makes them understand each other so well. That underlying pain he carried from feeling alone and unloved, all that guilt from the bad things he'd done in his life. And wasn't she carrying all those things around too? Hadn't she always? Sometimes back in Dharma she felt like he was the best, or only, redemption she could ever hope for. "What about it?" she teases lightly.

He rolls his eyes at her. She's glad this doesn't have to turn into some Huge Romantic Thing. "Will you stay?"

"James, I made that decision once before. It was probably the best decision I ever made. But you don't mind living with someone who's just a little bit crazy?"

He shrugs, trying to make it casual. "Never did before." She smacks him. "You don't mind living up here in the rainy-ass Northwest?"

"I think all you people are masochists, to tell you the truth."

"Masochists, huh? You know, that could add a whole new dimension to our relationship." He raises his eyebrows suggestively.

"Yeah, you know this is a really romantic conversation when S&M comes up."

"Stay with me, baby mama, and all sorts of things will come up."

"Is that so?" She leans forward, letting her shirt slide forward just enough to give him an amazing cleavage view. She waits until he knows he's distracted. "James?" she purrs.

"Uh... Yeah?" He forces his eyes back up to her face.

"You ever call me 'baby mama' again and I'll lock you in a cage with a fish biscuit dispenser."

He shakes his head once in that quick, sarcastic way of his, grinning. "Duly noted."

* * *

**Please leave a review! They make me so happy! Even happier than fish biscuits.**


	36. Dharma Drop

**Note: The flashback here follows directly after the second flashback in Ch. 26. And thanks so much for all your continued reviews! They totally make my day.**

* * *

_"What happened when you do the exact opposite of everything you are told? How would she know when she was done? And why wasn't anyone doing anything about this? Should I do something? What should I do?"_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

She calls Rachel and for whatever reason, James was right. The conversation is easy, and everything stays on the surface, but they're talking again, and it feels like maybe she has her sister still, after all. And if she'd used Nicholas as a companion to avoid thinking about James, what had Alice been? Her Rachel replacement on the island? But that would have been too simple.

They talk for over an hour, talk about nothing, but it's feels like something's healing. She finally hangs up and drops her phone on the kitchen counter right next to James' phone. As she's turning away, his starts to ring. She doubles back to get the phone to bring to him, but her eyes widen at the name she sees on the display.

_Oh, now THIS should be interesting,_ she thinks.

------ FLASHBACK (1923) ------

Juliet approached the kitchen area and folded her arms. "You want to tell me what you think you're doing?"

Nicholas skidded to a stop behind her. She'd been walking so fast she'd barely waited for him.

Alice looked at them innocently. "Eating oatmeal," she said, her mouth full.

"Hi Mama," Jonah said.

"Morning, buddy." She bent to kiss the top of his tiny head, then fixed her gaze back on Alice. "Well?"

Alice took another bite and exchanged a long look with Nicholas. "Would you mind taking Jonah over to Elspeth's when he's done eating? I'd like to talk to Juliet alone."

"That's fine."

"Come on, Jules, let's take a walk," Alice said a little too cheerfully.

They'd gotten barely out of earshot when Juliet stopped. "Why in hell did you think you'd send me into a redo?" she hissed. After Jacob had laid some of his cards on the metaphysical table, she'd told Richard a little about it. But she'd kept it all from Alice, including the particular detail regarding her apparent inclination toward survival.

Alice shrugged and kept walking. "How much do you know about those blackouts you had a few years ago?" she said over her shoulder.

Juliet hesitated, then started following her. "Enough. How much do _you_ know?"

Alice turned her head and winked. "Is this going to be like that first time-travel conversation we had?"

"I'm not going to try to explain e-mail to you again, if that's what you're asking." Juliet felt the tension fading slightly.

"All right, look. After you went to see Jacob, I did talk to Richard. Since he was there and all, and it was when he finally stopped, well, you know. Hating you. He told me about what happened during your blackouts. You went into a couple of redone battles."

"No one told me as much, but I'd assumed."

"I wanted to send you back into one of those because no one would know you were on the other side this time."

"That doesn't even make sense."

"Come on, Jules, it makes complete sense. It would be the perfect secret weapon."

"And you were going to send me into a redone battle totally unprepared? That's not the way those work!"

"You're telling me how this all works now?" It was one of the rare times Juliet saw Alice getting angry. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you, I just thought the ends would justify the means. You'd be OK, and we need every trick we can get."

"First of all, how do you know I'd be OK? Second of all, I used to think that about a lot of things -- the ends justifying the means. But it always seemed to end up burning me in the end. Especially once I ended up on this island. Ever see that thing on my back?" She sighed, exasperated. "I'm not going to that battle today. You asked me for one favor, months ago, and I've already done you six of those so-called favors, I killed a whole bunch of people for you, no questions asked. Today, I'm out of it. You're just going to have to make do without me, and without Nick, for that matter. Go talk to David."

"David's not even here," Alice sulked.

"Whoever, then, Al. I'm not here for this. Don't drag me into a war that I don't want to fight." They paused at the locked double doors of the arsenal.

"You're already in this war, Jules. You've been in it since you showed up here, whether you care about it or not." She removed the chain from where it hung around her neck, palmed the key. "Could you at least help me with some things first?"

* * *

Juliet returned to the kitchen area to find Jonah gone and Nicholas there percolating coffee. "Everything all right?" he asked.

She found a cup, held it out. "Alice is a little crazy, isn't she?"

"And you're just figuring out that now?" he asked. "Coffee's not ready yet; calm down."

She sat, ran a hand through her dirty hair. She needed to find some shampoo today. They were running low on everything right now. "Can I ask you a question?" The universal warning among the travelers.

"Sure."

"What was Japan like?"

He considered her question carefully, but his answer was simple. "A lot worse than this."

"Well, at least that's something."

He nodded.

"You ever think you'll go home?"

"Now why would I want to do that when I can have all this fun here?" He grinned and squinted into the sunlight, rubbed his hand over the back of his neck.

"So you're just as crazy as Alice, in other words."

"Why? You think you'll go home?"

Juliet shook her head, looked away. "No. I've been here ten years. This is it."

He checked the coffee, poured them each a cup. "After this I have to take care of some things. I might not see you for a few days. You going to be all right?"

"I'm fine," she said lightly. "I'm going to assume that Alice and I won't stay mad at each other forever."

"Good, 'cause we really don't need any more wars around here," he said, and she smiled.

* * *

Juliet found life strangely solitary over the next few days. She split childcare with Elspeth, who had one of the few other children in their camp, and spent large chunks of time reading or swimming (never opening her eyes under water, of course; who fucking needed that?). It felt quiet and peaceful and comforting, the kind of feeling that never seemed to last long.

She was sitting on a rock at the creek -- watching Jonah and Elspeth's son playing in the water -- when she heard twigs snapping. She whirled around to see Alice coming toward her with a couple of bulging satchels looped over each shoulder.

"What, they gave out door prizes at this latest battle?" Juliet asked.

"Nah, we made a little pitstop on the way back."

"Do I even want to know?"

"Sure you do!" Alice dropped the bags onto the ground, sorted through one of them and tossed her a white bottle with black lettering.

"Oh my God," Juliet muttered. "Oh my God."

"You needed shampoo, right?"

"Alice... This is Dharma shampoo."

"Sure. The boats have been too slow in coming."

"How the hell did you get this?"

She shrugged. "Intercepted a supply drop in the '70s. Wasn't exactly hard. Bunch of those Dharma fellows tried to run us off, but we stood our ground."

"The ones in the tan jumpsuits."

"Yeah. You interact much with them in the '70s? Bunch of bloody imbeciles, that lot."

"Oh my God. Alice."

"What?"

"I was _in_ the Dharma Initiative in the '70s."

"What?! You were with _them?"_

"Well, I didn't think it was a huge secret until just now."

"And _this_ is what we get for trying not to talk about our pasts." Alice threw her hands up in the air, exasperated. "Except for that stupid e-mail thing, which doesn't even make any sense. Does Richard know?"

"About e-mail?"

"About Dharma, for Christ's sake!"

"I am so _sick_ of answering to Richard all the time! For whatever it matters, yes, he knows. We've talked. A lot, unfortunately. He knows enough so that he'll be perfectly happy to go track me down in Miami in 2001."

Alice shook her head, looking disappointed. "I can't believe you were with _them_."

"You name a faction, I've been in it, I think." She rolled her eyes. "I defected from, well, _us_ -- to join a group of plane crash survivors. Then some of us got sent back and we ended up with Dharma. And now I'm here. Can't wait to see what happens next," she said sarcastically.

Alice narrowed her eyes. "This is.... Jules, the more I know, the more I don't want to know. Where's your loyalty lie, anyway?"

"With whoever just brought me shampoo. What else do you have in there?"

Alice handed over one of the bags and they each rooted through one. Juliet wasn't going to say anything more if Alice didn't. Besides, the spoils of war were beginning to look fairly sweet, especially when their boat shipments were running so behind. Dharma toothpaste. Dharma tampons. Dharma aspirin. Dharma peanut butter. Dharma cereal -- it had been so long since they'd had any kind of processed food and she hadn't realized how much she'd been craving it. "Too bad they don't drop milk," she said.

"Powdered only, sorry, love. So what years were you with them, anyway?"

"Why? What year did you go to?" This conversation was going to turn her stomach if it continued, she was sure of it.

"1976."

She tried to keep her breathing even. "These Dharma guys, what'd they look like?"

"Skinny dark-haired one, ugly as hell, big eyebrows. Big fair-haired bloke from the American South, one hell of a mouth on that one. And a Chinese one, I think."

"He have an accent?"

"Yes. You know him?" Alice looked amazed.

"He's not Chinese, he's Korean. The guy with the eyebrows is Phil. Complete asshole. Please feel free to shoot him next time. And the mouthy Southern one is Jonah's father." She managed that all admirably, but then she folded her arms around her waist and tried to force back tears. Why did Alice get to see him and she didn't? Why was James on the island in this other time and she was stuck here while some other version of her got to be with him? She pinched her fingers to the bridge of her nose, trying to hide the tears. "Sorry."

"Oh, hell Jules, I'm sorry." Alice scrambled to her feet and hugged her while she cried. "We just needed some stuff. I had no idea."

"I know," she managed as they broke apart. "I saw him once, too. When I went back to the night of the flaming arrow attack." She managed to raise her eyes to Alice's; in her peripheral vision she was watching the boys playing at the edge of the creek. "What if Jonah grows up here and he's still part of this? That attack is thirty years from now. What if -- he's one of them?"

"One of _them?_ Jules, that's _us_."

"I know." That night -- her second time experiencing that night, anyway -- was nearly four years ago for her now, the last time she'd seen him, and it didn't even count; it had only half-happened. Everything was twisted up and knotted in on itself here. She sighed and picked up one of the bags. "Time travel's a bitch."

------ END FLASHBACK ------

James' phone continues to ring in her hand. She's tempted to answer it herself, and decides this is just too ridiculously funny. If she's right, anyway.

The name on the display is: Fuckhead.

She flips the phone open, and before she can say a word, a voice drawls, "Hey idiot, you forget how a fuckin' phone works?"

She bites back a laugh, but the grin on her face is threatening to split her face apart. "Hey Miles. It's Juliet."

His roar is so loud she has to hold the phone away from her ear.


	37. Self

_"I had once believed in a precious inner self, but now I didn't. I had thought that I was fragile, but I wasn't."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

Where the hell is Clementine?

James slides the glass door open and Juliet darts her head around the edge of the chaise lounge. "Glad to see you're finally willin' to use chairs again," he said. "Told ya they ain't so bad." He walks out onto the deck and stands next to her. She's holding an apple in one hand and his cell phone in the other, but she manages to simultaneously roll her eyes and take a bite from the apple she's eating, looking rapturous. "Who you talkin' to on my phone?"

She arches an eyebrow. "Fuckhead."

He leans over to the phone in her hand. "Hey!!" he yells into it. "You stay away from my girl, ya hear me?!"

Though the phone's several inches away, they can both hear Miles screaming, "Up yours, LaFleur!" She grins and takes another bite of her apple.

"You know, I never seen anyone look so happy to be eatin' an apple."

"Try going six years without one. What's up? I have to get back to our polite and respectful friend, here."

"You seen Clementine?"

Juliet points. Just over the swell of the yard, where the land slopes down toward the edge of the property, he can see a flash of brown hair, the top of his wayward daughter's head.

"Well, what the hell's she doin' way down there?"

"I think she's hiding from me. Or painting her nails. Either one."

"Listen, the boy's still passed out on the couch. I'm gonna take her out for awhile."

Juliet nods and brings the phone back to her ear, sending him a silent _Better you than me._

Clem is sprawled out on the grass with several bottles of nail polish lined up on the back side of one of those teen magazines her mother hates. "You didn't wait to paint your nails with me?" he whines, teasing, and she looks at him sourly. "Come on, kiddo, you wanna bust outta here for awhile?"

She nods.

"Ice cream?"

"Starbucks."

"What are you, 37 years old?"

* * *

Clementine wins, naturally, and after they've got their drinks, they sit outside in the courtyard. She fidgets with the dark green straw, poking at the ice cubes in her iced tea. "So what's goin' on?" he tries.

She shrugs.

"Well, I got somethin' to tell you, and then we can go from there."

She looks up at him, her eyes full of hurt. "They're staying, aren't they?"

He nods. "We're gonna make this work, kiddo. I know it's gonna be an adjustment, but --"

"It's not gonna be an adjustment, it _sucks_!" she bursts out. "I _hate_ her."

"No, you don't."

She glares at him, sulking.

"You don't hate her. You hate that it's gonna be not just us anymore. I get that. I'm gonna miss that too, ladybug. It was always just me an' you against the world. And when you get mad at your mom and you come stormin' over to me, that's the highlight of my whole damn day."

"So how come you're doing this." She's balling up her fists at her sides, staring at the ground.

"Things change. Jules -- I've missed her. I've missed her a whole lot."

"Then how come you never talked about her before?"

He feels a lump in his throat. _Oh shit. Not this, not now._ "Hurt too much."

"What if you break up?"

"I dunno. I don't think that's gonna happen, though. I hope not."

"Mom and _Rob_ got a divorce," she says softly, skimming the edges of her flip-flops back and forth along a crack in the pavement. "And _you_ and mom broke up."

"Yeah. People don't always know what they're doin' in life. Even when they're grown up."

She fixes her eyes on him. "So how come you think you know what you're doing now?"

"Kiddo, I.... A lot of life is just guessin'. I wish I could tell you something better than that, but a whole lot of my life -- I've just been winging it, all right? But what I know is that you, she an' him are the best things that ever happened to me in my whole life. And I don't wanna let any of you go."

"Where's he gonna sleep? I'm not sharing my room forever."

"He's either gonna take the den, or you can have the den if you want. It's a little bigger, and you can have that TV in there if you want."

She shakes her head vehemently. "I want _my_ room. I'm not changing."

"OK. That's fine. Whatever you want, it's your call."

"Can I redecorate?"

"Why? You just said you ain't movin' rooms."

"So maybe I just wanna redecorate," she hedges.

"We'll talk about that later. I ain't bribin' you out right, if that's what you're askin'."

"So what's wrong with her, anyway?"

"Juliet?"

"Yeah."

"She's upset about a bunch of stuff that happened where she was livin' before."

"She said it was ... um, political something?"

"That's ... Yeah. It got violent there, I guess. Bad things happened, really bad. She don't like to talk about it much."

"Is she gonna get better, at least?"

He's reminded of his daughter's endless compassion underneath that tough-as-nails exterior. Sort of like Juliet, actually. "Yeah. I think so. I hope so."

"What if she doesn't? What if she stays all sad and weird?"

"She ain't sad and weird all the time, is she?"

"No."

"We're gonna be a family, Clem. Family stays together when someone's havin' a hard time. That's what family does. You know that."

"_No_. Mom and Rob started to fight all the time and now he's _gone_. You're not getting married, are you?"

"Uh. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, all right? Not any time soon, I don't think."

She nods. "I liked being the only kid at your house. My sisters suck."

"First of all, don't say that. Your sisters don't suck, they're just little. Little kids need a lot of attention. And watch your language, will you?"

"'Sucks' isn't a curse word."

"It's enough to make your mom yell at me if she hears that come outta your mouth."

"You guys aren't going to have a baby or anything, are you?"

_Oh for Christ's sake._"Listen, some things are gonna change. That's the way life is, and you're old enough to get that by now." Time to turn on that million-dollar charm. "But you'll always my number one girl, sweetheart." Ah, James Ford. He can charm the ladies at any age, right?

Nope. She rolls her eyes. "That's crazy cheesy, Dad."

"Well, whaddya want from me? You're tougher than me an' your mom put together sometimes."

She swings her legs, grins. "Yep," she says airily.

James decides to consider that conversation a draw.

* * *

Dinner is a mostly quiet, tense affair. Only Jonah doesn't seem to get what's going on, but he's not a big talker anyway.

After the kids are asleep, James and Juliet sit out on the deck and end up drinking a little -- or OK, a lot -- too much. Tomorrow will be his last day off before he has to go back to work on Tuesday, and they have to celebrate somehow, right? And when they stumble up the stairs and into the bedroom, she practically slams him into the wall, her tongue halfway down his throat.

OK. This is good. This is _very_ good. Last night had been tentative and careful, it was still amazing but she wasn't quite all there. And this morning, sure, that had been fun as hell, but it was quiet and rushed. Now she's three sheets to the wind and he'd almost feel bad for taking advantage of her, except he's three or four sheets to the wind himself, and anyway, something tells him they'd be exactly where they are now, anyway. Meaning pulling each other's clothes off as quickly as possible.

He has a feeling from the gaps in their conversations that she was probably with someone else during her time on the island, and he is surprised to realize doesn't mind, he's glad she wasn't alone. They'd both tried to fill up their time, find someone else, but he had to face it, no one was going to be a better fit. That doesn't mean he wants to hear all about some other guy, though, and he's not planning on broaching it unless she does first.

And why is he even thinking about this right now? He's half-naked, she's _all_ naked, and there are much more important things to focus on. Like flipping on the stereo in the very near future, because he's guessing she's going to be a little bit too loud -- although considering what he's doing to her right now, he has to consider it a compliment.

------ FLASHBACK (1923) ------

"I'm bored," Juliet said.

"Considering where we are right now, I'm going to pretend I didn't just hear that."

She stuck out her tongue and rolled over, stealing the sheet from him. "I didn't mean _that_. I mean -- I just wish I could go to a movie or something."

"You're just bored because you got used to going on Alice's little ambushes, and now you miss it."

She wrinkled her nose. "What's there to miss about it?"

"Let's not have this conversation."

"Aren't you bored? You can't travel," she pointed out.

"I'm keeping busy," he replied, and ripped the sheet from her grasp. She screeched and swatted him away as he planted a kiss on her stomach just below her navel. "Stop it, I have to go soon," she reminded him, wiggling away from his grasp.

"What, go and be bored by yourself?"

"I have to get Jonah from Elspeth. She's not as much of a sucker as Alice is. What are you doing today? You want to go to the beach?"

He shook his head. "I do, but I have some things to take care of."

"It's getting empty around here," she said quietly, watching the shadows of the trees waving on the tent floor.

He touched her wrist. "They'll be back. Don't worry." But fewer came back every time.

* * *

By late in the day, Juliet realized the camp had nearly entirely cleared out again. Nicholas was gone. She couldn't figure out where he was going, since he couldn't travel, but she'd never been big on asking questions. Alice had been gone for days planning a redo near the Black Rock.

She couldn't remember when the place had been so quiet.

Four days later, people finally started to trickle back in from wherever they'd been. She stitched up some cuts, dressed a few wounds and removed a bullet from Christopher's shoulder while Elspeth watched and worried. "You'll be fine as long as you take it easy," she told him.

"Thanks, Jules," he said, easing gingerly off the table in her cabin, keeping his opposite hand just below the bandage.

"Elspeth, I can keep little Chris overnight if you want," Juliet offered.

Elspeth glanced at her, her eyes full of unshed tears. "That would be great, Jules. Thanks."

"No problem," she replied, thanking whatever island deities were listening that at least she was able to help this time. She was still standing at the door of her cabin, watching them go, when she saw Richard staring at her from across the clearing. She folded her arms.

Richard pointed to his right, their sign that he wanted to talk to her in private. She shook her head and pointed into the cabin behind her. She had the kids in there, and Chris' father had just been shot; she couldn't find someone to look after them so she could go traipsing off to the jungle now. He stared at her impatiently and she shook her head again. Finally he walked away.

Hours later he was knocking on her door. She swung it open and glared at him. "I just got them to sleep."

"Can't you find someone to watch them?"

"Who do you suggest?"

"Can I come in, then?" He looked a bit rattled -- at least, as rattled as Richard could get, anyway.

"Fine," she finally said.

They sat in the dim light of a turned-down lantern, on the other side of the cabin from the bed where the boys were sleeping. "We've got a problem."

"Don't we always?"

"Juliet. Do you remember what I said to you the night we first met?"

"No idea. Do you still think I'm working for Ben?" she said sarcastically, arching an eyebrow.

"Latet anguis in herba." A snake lies in the grass. "And I'm afraid to tell you that I'm still right about that. Ben is working with someone in this camp. And if that's someone's not you, then we need to know who."

"It's not me," Juliet said expressionlessly.

"I know. I believe you now, you know. And that's why I'm talking to you now. Someone's been fighting with inside knowledge, though. Feeding things through, locations, times. Can you think of anyone who's been acting strangely lately? Or who's been gone, but not supposed to be in battle?" Richard looked into her eyes, his gaze knowing.

Nicholas. She did her best not to react openly, but her lungs felt too tight and she had to force herself to breathe evenly._ This is not really happening. _The room was too small, too dark all of a sudden, like the walls were threatening to close in on her. She traced the pattern of the floor with her eyes, the whirls of the rough wood, trying to imagine she was anywhere but here. She tried to remember Rachel's face. Couldn't. "Let me see what I can find out," she said.

* * *

She was on her way up to the creek carrying pails for water, when the familiar sound of cracking twigs echoed somewhere close. She turned around slowly.

Another Juliet was watching her. "Sorry," her other self said, wincing, glancing back over her shoulder. She fluttered a hand behind her as though warning someone else to stay back. "This is a little awkward, huh?"

Juliet stared at the other version of herself, who looked more amused than she felt right now. This other Juliet looked cheerfully dirty, her hair a few inches longer, a rifle hanging from its strap over her shoulder. They looked about the same age, which made her feel a little better. She didn't know how she would handle it if she ever saw herself old, still here on this island.

"I was here first," Juliet hedged.

Her other self smirked. "You got that right. Sorry, I'm thirsty. Gimme a second." She uncapped her canteen and dipped it into the creek.

Juliet folded her arms and watched.

"Do you have to stare at me like that?" her other self asked. "It's kinda creepy." She splashed some water onto her face, wiped away a thin layer of dirt.

"You're me, I'm you, I'll watch if I want. Glad that haircut is growing out."

"Yeah, it's taking forever."

"Huh. You know, we're wearing the same shoes. I mean -- the exact same shoes."

Her other self stood. "Trust me, this is just as weird for me as it is for you. Don't worry, I'm leaving now." She paused. "Hey, you don't have any bullets on you, do you?"

Juliet shook her head.

"That's OK. I didn't have any either, when I was standing where you are now."

"Um. Since you're here, can I ask you something?"

Her other self considered this for a long moment, and Juliet realized just how good her poker face really was. Finally her other self said, "No. Sorry," and her eyes were suddenly huge and sad. The other self took a breath in like she was about to say something else, then thought better of it and shook her head.

Juliet understood that this future version probably remembered exactly what she'd wanted to know. She'd been holding her breath while she'd waited, and now she exhaled slowly, disappointed. "Fine."

"Well, um..." Her other self laughed -- just one short, single note, anticipating what Juliet would say now.

Juliet nodded. "See you later, I guess."

She turned to leave the way she'd come, and then Juliet was alone again.

------ END FLASHBACK ------


	38. Said and Unsaid

**Wow, I think this is actually the longest I've gone without updating! At least I think it's also the longest chapter I've ever done. So here are a bunch of "missing pieces" that I know several of you have been asking for -- and one that sorta comes out of nowhere but I'd been imagining. FYI, Ch. 40 is nearly done, but I have to come with with a pesky Ch. 39 first, now don't I?"**

**This is dedicated to makealist, who just finished writing the _incredible_ "Deja Vu All Over Again." Thank you for giving us all this AMAZING story!**

* * *

_"Each day I wondered what would happen next. What happens when you stop wanting, when you are happy. I supposed I would go on being happy forever."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

**Thursday, July 18, 2013 **

Juliet storms into the backyard, slamming the door behind her. "James!" she barks. He snaps his head up, still hanging onto the kid on the bike. "Will you PLEASE tell my sister that I'm not freaking insane and there really IS an island?" she yells, holding the phone out to him.

_Oh shit,_ he thinks.

"Just do your best," she mutters.

He takes the phone reluctantly. "Uh, hello?"

"James?" Her voice is lower than Juliet's and a bit on the nasal side. Strange that he could have spent three years hearing all about her, and this is the first time he's talking to her. And she sounds... well, kinda pissy.

"Yeah, this is James."

"And what's your last name, James?"

"Ford. Ya want my social security number, too?"

"That won't be necessary. Not yet, anyway. So, you wanna tell me how you two met?" she challenges him.

"Yeah, we met on the island."

"And were you recruited by weird corporate secrecy eyeliner pirates, too?"

"Me? My plane crashed there."

"Well, isn't that convenient. And then, what? You were having trouble getting pregnant and Juliet showed up to cure all your fertility woes?"

He's beginning to see that Juliet's sarcastic streak must run in the family, but where he'd found Juliet merely scary at first, this Rachel is fucking terrifying. He wonders if the Others had recruited the wrong sister. He reminds himself to be patient and polite. Kill 'em with kindness. "No, she'd already been there three years."

"OK, pop quiz, buddy. What was the name of the company she'd been told she was working for?"

"Mittelos."

"But you were part of some other faction."

"Yeah."

"And she joined up with you all."

"Yeah."

"And what were you doing as part of your happy little island faction?"

The shorter he makes his answers, the less likely he is to slip up. At least, he's hoping. "Head of security."

"Head of security, and you couldn't help her get away? When exactly did _you_ get to leave?"

She's too emotional; he'll have to let that barb go. Has to let them all go. Juliet needs this. He grits his teeth. "Six years ago."

"And what do you do now, mystery man?"

"I'm a librarian." How sweet, a man who just loves books, he can't sound too bad, right?

"A librarian," she purrs. "Well, isn't that just so freakin' adorable. OK. Gainfully employed, that's a start. And you're really sure she's not just imagining there was an island?"

"No, definitely not."

Rachel pauses a long moment, and he knows she's trying to decide. Finally she says, "Take care of her, OK? I'm worried about her. She's a goddamn mess right now, in case you haven't noticed."

He has, but he's not going to talk about that with Juliet standing right in front of him. "OK" is all he can manage. He looks up at Juliet, who's still shaking with anger. He extends the phone to her. "Here."

**

* * *

Friday, July 19, 2013 **

Her ringing phone wakes her early on the second morning at James' house. An unfamiliar number lights up the display; it's really ridiculously early for anyone to call. She rolls over in the cold empty bed -- except for the one warm spot that's Cat, that sneaky little bitch -- and reaches for the device on the end table. Her voice is hoarse. "Hello?"

"Juliet?"

She squinches her eyes shut. The voice is familiar. Too familiar. "Who is this?" she asks, although she already has her suspicions.

"It's Jack. Jack Shepherd." (She rolls her eyes behind her closed eyelids.) "I'm sorry to be calling so early." Jack sounds terrible, his voice low and gravelly, and she idly wonders if he's even slept yet.

A buzzing sound threatens to drown out her hearing. "How did you get this number?"

"Hurley. He told me you were back." Not Kate? But she realizes that other than the fact that Kate's on a girls-only cruise with Cassidy right now, she knows absolutely nothing about their lives now, and it's probably better that way. And somehow she's thinking that Jack coerced Hugo into giving up her number. She can read between the lines.

"Richard Alpert told us you were dead -- I'm so sorry, Juliet, and I ... I know you probably don't want to talk to me, but -- "

"Well, Jack," she says, "you always did have to be right about everything." She turns off her phone and rolls over into a nest of cat hair._ Fuck._

She gets up and is pitching the cat out into the hall just as James pokes his head out the door of the den.

* * *

James doesn't know what possessed him to do it, but he'd seen Juliet's phone on the table and flicked it on, copied Rachel's number onto a slip of paper and stuffed it into his pocket. After he drops Clementine off at camp, he digs his Bluetooth out of the center console and dials.

"Hello, who's this?"

"Uh... This is James. You know, Juliet's, um..." What the hell is he, anyway?

"What? What's the matter? Is she all right?" Rachel sounds panicked.

"No -- no, she's fine."

"What's wrong, then?"

"Nothin's wrong, I just thought maybe we could get a little better acquainted while she's not, ya know... right there."

She hesitates, but after a long moment she says, "That probably makes sense," and James is relieved to hear there's much less animosity in her voice than yesterday. At least until the next thing she says, all sarcastic-sounding again. "Say, tell me about that explosion."

_Oh crap._ "It was at a construction site. A few of us had gone out there to -- well, we went out there. They were drillin' this big hole and they hit some sorta pocket of energy. Electromagnetic, y'know." _Right._ He's sure she totally knows. "A bunch of us got knocked out, and they ended up evacuating. By -- by the time I woke up we were already on the way back. I couldn't -- I couldn't get back to her. I didn't know what happened to her."

"Why didn't you ever try to contact me? I would have liked to know."

"No, you wouldn't have. Trust me, I wanted to call you, go visit, maybe -- but what was I supposed to do, anyway? Tell you some horrible story and finish it off by saying I didn't know whether she was alive or dead, but if she was alive, she was all alone on some crazy mystery island?"

"Crazy mystery island. You know, that's what Brian and I have been calling it."

He grins. "We actually always called it Craphole Island."

A delighted laugh comes to him over the phone in return, and he relaxes somewhat. "That's a good one. We might have to start using that. But I guess I understand why you wouldn't have wanted to call me. You're right. It probably would have made it worse. But at least I could have had something to give to the police."

"Yeah, about that -- "

"Oh, not you too."

"All's I'm sayin' is, it probably would do more harm than good. Upset her more, and if there are people after her -- "

"If there are really people after her, shouldn't we _definitely_ get the police involved?" she says in a tone of voice that implies she thinks he's about three years old. Now that tone, he definitely recognizes. Juliet and Miles in Dharma all over again.

"I can't tell ya what to do, it's not like I can stop you from here, but I'm just gonna put it out there that I think callin' the cops is a really, really bad idea. They'll never believe anything she has to tell 'em."

"I think Juliet has Stockholm Syndrome. You too, maybe."

"It's... a little more complicated than that. The people who took her, she hated them. She did what they wanted her to, but she didn't like it and she didn't like _them_. When my group showed up, she sorta played both sides, all sneaky-like. Goddamn, I was scared of her." Rachel laughs again. "Eventually she ditched them and came over with us."

"You said your plane crashed there?"

_Shit._ Oceanic 815 never crashed after all. He has a really hard time believing that, though, even after all this time. "Yeah. It was a small private plane. We took off from Fiji. Few hours in, lost radio contact."

"What about that other group she was with after you left?"

"I don't know much about 'em. She don't really like to talk about it. She had this friend there, Alice? Just about lost it when I asked her about it."

"So what are we supposed to do about her? You know, the person she was before she left -- I never would have that she could handle all this, go through what she did, and still be basically functioning. Sure she's a mess right now, but something about her did change for the better on that island."

"Yeah. That's what she told me too. 'Course, that was before. I think we just need to give it time. Let it all come out at its own pace."

"You sending her back to me at some point?"

"That's up to her."

"I freaked her out, huh? I know I should have just shut the hell up, I kept _telling_ myself to just shut up, shut up, shut _up_, but she just up and left Miami and wasn't returning my calls, and I got scared. I didn't know what she was doing, couldn't figure out if she was having some sort of mental breakdown -- or already had when she was missing all those years -- and then Jonah. I was so worried about him. Is he OK?"

"He's fine. It's been good gettin' to know him. Teachin' him how to ride a bike, all that dad stuff, you know? Just -- just go easy on her, all right? If she just wants to just talk about her day, just let her."

"Yeah. I will. If she ever calls me back."

"I'll get her to call you. I can be _real_ subtle about it."

"Thank you."

"Yeah." There's a pause. Might as well just come out with it. "I don't want to take her away from you but... I think I ought to tell you that I'm gonna tell her -- you know, when the time's right -- she's welcome to stay here if she wants."

"Really." He can't tell from Rachel's tone exactly what she thinks of this.

"I... things ain't been the same without her. All this time without her, I never forgot about her, not for one day. I think she feels the same way, but it could just be wishful thinkin' on my part."

"Shit. All right, I guess I should try to be happy for her but. But twelve years apart and I only had six days."

"If she stays -- you know she'll come visit. A lot. I'll make sure of it. And you'll come here."

"You just had to live clear on the other side of the country, didn't you, mystery island librarian?"

"Yeah, well, anything that's worth doin' is worth doin' difficult."

"I don't think that's how the saying goes."

"Yeah, probably not."

* * *

**Sunday, July 21, 2013 **

Juliet flips the phone open, and before she can say a word, a voice drawls, "Hey idiot, you forget how a fuckin' phone works?"

She bites back a laugh, but the grin on her face is threatening to split her face apart. "Hey Miles. It's Juliet."

His roar is so loud she has to hold the phone away from her ear. After a moment she tentatively brings it back. Miles is already ranting and raving. "Jesus Christ, no one ever tells me anything! _Shit!_ I can't believe you're _alive!_ Thank _God!_ You OK? All in one piece?"

"More or less."

"How long you been back? You were on the island, right? Hey, if you were living it up in Rio this entire time..."

"That would have probably been a better idea. But, two and a half weeks, to answer your question."

Miles is still spazzing. "Holy _crap_. Wow, thank Christ. I'm so glad you're -- hey, you seen Jim yet?"

"_Seriously?_ Whose phone did you _just_ call?"

"Oh thank Christ," he mutters again. "The guy's been a fucking wreck without you."

She glances around the neat, homey kitchen, the blue-and-white tiles over the sink. Shoes lined up at the back door, Clementine's most recent report card (nearly all A's) held onto the fridge by a green magnet shaped like the state of Oregon. "What?"

"Oh come on, he beat the shit out of a tree in his yard with an axe. An _axe_! And that was _before_ he fully remembered."

"I don't know. He seems like he has his act together."

"Guy's a conman, remember? Hey, you guys getting back together?"

She considers this carefully. "I think so." She roots through the fridge, finds an apple. Marvels, once more, at just how much she'd ended up missing completely normal things, like apples.

Miles heaves a gigantic sigh. "Thank God, I can't stand his bitching anymore. So, you guys screwing yet?"

"Well, Miles," she says, "it's been great speaking to you. Good-bye." She makes absolutely no move to actually hang up the phone.

"Fine, fine, fine. You can't kill me for being curious. I mean, shit, six years? So, what happened to you? You woke up in 2004 again with our good buddy Ben?"

"Nope, I woke up in 1919 with our good buddy Ben."

"You're shitting me!"

"Wish I was." She walks out to the back deck, sits on the chaise. Turns her face to the sunlight struggling to break though the clouds. "You know, your pilot called me a native, but he really had no idea."

He whistles. "That must have sucked. You didn't even have plumbing, did you?"

"No plumbing, no electricity, no Thai restaurants that delivered. So tell me what's going on with you." She bites into the apple. _Perfection._

Miles launches into the story of how he met his girlfriend, Brenna, whose friend had hired him to check up on a dead father's wayward valuables. Brenna had scowled at him and kept her arms crossed during the entire session. "Man, did she ever have a stick up her ass, but she was like totally hot."

"Of course."

"So anyways, she didn't believe me, she was actually there because she thought her friend was nuts, wanted to keep me from scamming her. Yeah, like she coulda managed that," he scoffs. "But then I told her friend the combo to the dad's safe and it was a whole new ballgame. Whole. New. Ballgame. Chick couldn't keep her hands off me." He discusses about Brenna's virtues, physical and otherwise, for the next couple minutes.

At a lull in conversation, she asks, "You all right about your dad?"

"What? Oh. Yeah, I guess so. I mean, it helps just knowing that he didn't ditch me and my mom, you know?"

"What happened after I fell?"

"Uhh, I didn't really see that happen, but my dad's arm was crushed and I was pulling him away. He was in" -- here Miles' voice breaks, just for a second -- "a lot of pain. There was a ton of blood. We got, I dunno, maybe half a mile away and then this was this big white flash and I was back in Encino. In 2007."

"Hmm. Did James tell you what happened to your father?"

"What?? No."

"I don't know if he knows, but I saw plenty of those Dharma orientation films before I joined the Oceanic survivors. He survived, he was OK. He had a prosthetic hand after."

"But then there was the Purge."

They're both silent for a long moment. Finally she says, "What was it like getting to know your dad that way?"

"Weird. I dunno. I mean, at least I know he gave a shit about us, but he was still sort of a douche about most things. And why the hell did he like country? That I never got."

"But -- time traveling and seeing your dad only a little bit older than you. Wouldn't that just feel sort of, I don't know, warped?"

"Yeah, that's why I avoided them almost the entire time I was there. Remember that party in the rec room that my parents showed up to?"

"You got really _quite_ wasted."

"Exactly. Hey, so why are you asking me about this now?"

She pauses. Jin was her friend in Dharma, James her lover, and Miles more like the obnoxious little brother who drove her nuts. But for all his bluster, they could always, always trust each other. "Don't tell James what I'm about to tell you, all right? I haven't figured out yet how to tell him about this."

"You know, Juliet, relationships should be based on honesty and trust," he says in a mocking tone. She knows he's making fun of her attempts to offer him relationship advice back in Dharma.

"Miles?"

"Shut up?"

"Thank you. All right, here it is. I ended up spending quite a bit of time with my son when he was 34."

"On the island? Wait a... You have a kid?!"

"Yes. He's five and a half. You know, when he's not 34."

"Shit. Wait a sec. It's not -- Jim's, is it?"

"Don't call him an 'it,' Miles. He's a kid, not an order of fries. And -- yes. James is his father."

"Holy -- wait a sec, how's that work, anyway? You didn't get a reset like the rest of us."

"Hence that whole 1919 thing. I don't know, maybe I didn't get a reset because I was the one who set off the bomb."

"What?!"

"You think I was just down there throwing a party for the mole people?"

"We didn't think -- um, we didn't think you woulda lived. Well, now _that's_ kinda awkward. Did you know, before? That you were having a kid?"

"Yes."

"And you were willing to erase that kid to erase the past."

"Unfortunately, yes."

"Jesus Christ! You're the worst mother EVER! You're worse than Dan's mom!"

"Miles?"

"Shut up?"

"Exactly. Look, it was a stupid plan, but in the end it got almost everyone back to where they were supposed to be, right? We saved how many lives?"

"Yeah, like 250 or something. Try not to get a big head about it, Dr. I Save Everyone. Oh man, Jack is gonna shit himself when he hears this!" Miles sounds gleeful.

"Miles," she says warningly.

Miles coughs back his next laugh. "Right. Sorry. And that must have really sucked for you, anyway."

She laughs. "You have no idea."

"So you just, like, popped out a baby in the middle of the jungle?"

"Well, there was a time-traveling midwife there, too. And you of all people know what it's like to have a weird life."

"Yeah, but at least mine's been consistently weird. I don't think you were born into this insanity like I was. Hey, but your kid was! Oh, now _that's_ weird..."

"What?"

"You're gonna have to raise your kid to grow up and get back to the island."

"I'm not doing that."

"Seems like you already did."

"Well, 'what happened, happened' isn't working the same way anymore. Because of the bomb. Sometimes things change. Maybe he won't end up going."

"Well, maybe," Miles says doubtfully. "But yeah, I see what you mean. 'Cause, L.A. has _how_ many people who are basically the walking dead? It's really cutting into business."

She smirks at the phone. "Here's something weird. I know you and James and the rest of you have two sets of memories. I don't, not really, but sometimes my memories change. Just little things, but I keep wondering if big things can change too. They were changing things on purpose back then, fighting battles over again. I mean, what happened could really, really change."

"Hey, what if something happens to you back there and you just disappear from here? Like Marty McFly's hand in Back to the Future?"

She tries to keep her tone light, but the truth is, that thought's occurred to her, too. "Didn't you already debunk that with Hugo?"

"Hey, I'm just sayin'."

"I've been thinking about this. I think there just needs to be some sort of defined endpoint. The bomb opened a loophole -- a time loop, I guess, or an undefined number of time loops -- and it needs to be closed. I might need to talk to Daniel."

"LaFleur know _any_ of this?"

"Some. Not about Jonah time-traveling when he's grown. Not about -- what could happen if there's never any endpoint. I don't want to scare him."

"Yeah, I guess he sorta _would_ freak out if you could just disappear at any time," he says sarcastically. "Well, good luck getting in touch with Twitchy. He's hardly working, spends half his time wrapped around Charlotte. Never answers the fucking phone."

"He deserves to be happy. He'll get back to his work when he's ready. That, I'm sure of."

"Yeah, what makes you so sure?"

"Because my son will grow up to work for him."

Dead silence. Juliet is a bit impressed with herself -- after all, it takes a hell of a lot to render Miles speechless. In the brief bit before he can start up his manic patter again, James slides the glass door open. "Hang on," she tells Miles, and cranes her neck to see James.

"Glad to see you're finally willin' to use chairs again," he said. "Told ya they ain't so bad." He walks out onto the deck and stands next to her, watching her eat her apple. "Who you talkin' to on my phone?"

She arches an eyebrow. "Fuckhead."

He leans over to the phone in her hand. "Hey!!" he yells into it. "You stay away from my girl, ya hear me?!"

Though the phone's several inches away, they can both hear Miles screaming, "Up yours, LaFleur!" She grins and takes another bite of her apple.

When James has set off again for the slope of the hill, she brings the phone back to her ear. "Hey."

"Oh yeah," Miles says. "You guys are definitely back together. He might as well pee a circle around you."


	39. Double or Nothing

**FYI, I think we're looking at 55-60 chapters total, but my outline is not at all as precise as it used to be. I have lots more island flashbacks (all these little mentions and loose ends WILL be tied up) to tell as well as present story (ditto). I have a few finishing touches to put on Ch. 40 but it should be up in like 24 hours. This is sort of a transitional chapter which is what I've done to myself by writing 40 before 39, but there you have it.**

* * *

_"Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It's okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

On Monday morning James opens his eyes to see Juliet pressing a hand to her forehead. He can't stop the low growl of a laugh from rolling up in his throat. "Hung over on a Monday, you oughta be ashamed of yourself." She tries to smile back but it doesn't quite reach her eyes. "Hey, you OK?" he asks, concerned, reaching out to touch her wrist.

"Yeah, I'll be all right. I just... get these headaches."

"Why, what kinda headaches?"

She doesn't let her hand fall. "Oh, it's too early for this. You're not hungover, are you?"

"I'm fine, but I think I mighta had a little more recent practice at this."

"Then you don't know my last few weeks on the island. Good thing I left when I did or I would have needed a liver transplant." She finally drops her hand, rolls onto her side to look at him. A small smile does start to inhabit her features. He can't believe the other day she'd been bitching about being old. She looks just the same to him (OK, well almost), but it's still better than he'd even remembered. But then there's a part of him that still can't believe this warm body next to him really belongs to her. That she could be _here_, now, whole and warm and with him. She'd given him the first real home he'd ever known, never judged, never asked for more than he could give her.

Now she reaches out to stroke his lips with her fingertips, looking up at him. "Morning."

He moves to kiss her, reaches for her and she moves closer, meets his lips once, softly and then curls up in his arms. She relaxes and closes her eyes. He wishes he could figure out how to tell her everything he's thinking and feeling about her right in this moment, but instead what comes out is, "You want me to get you some Tylenol or somethin'?"

"Mmm. It's not that kind of headache." She slides an arm around him and sighs. "This is nice. I wish everything could just freeze right here."

So does he. He starts kissing the side of her forehead, just where she'd been holding her hand earlier, and she lets out a contented sigh.

"Better than Tylenol?" he asks.

"Ohh, yeah."

* * *

When James has headed out to bring Clementine to camp, she turns and faces Jonah, who's been grasping incessantly at her sleeve. "Can I go play Nintendo?"

"It's nine in the morning."

"So?"

She wants to say, _SO, you grew up on a remote tropical island in the 1920s and the first time you ever even saw a TV was earlier this month, and now you want to play VIDEO GAMES at nine in the morning?_ "Why don't you go read your books for awhile while I make breakfast?"

"Mamaaa," he starts to whine.

"Hey." She cuts him off. "I have a headache, no arguing. Go." She shakes her head. The boy never whined until he set foot in 2013. She doesn't know whether to blame the Nintendo or the other billion things that have changed for them.

While she's cutting up fruit, she clamps the phone between her ear and shoulder, counting the rings. After four, an automated recording comes on.

"Hey, John. It's Juliet," she says in response. "I wanted to talk to you about some things. Call me when you have a chance, OK? Thanks. Bye."

She calls to Jonah, makes him come and set out forks and spoons, fold napkins. James often assigns him these duties, and she's not sure if she'd have thought of chores this early in the game, but Jonah seems to like having a job, and it seems like the Responsible Parent Thing of her to do. Especially considering exactly how _ir_responsible she's been in at least several other situations.

"Mama?" He's poking his index finger into the middle of a banana slice. Her ban on mangos and bananas had lasted approximately one week.

She bites her tongue over his table manners. He's getting ready to ask a Big Question, and he never asks those. They can't both be silent forever or she won't know which of them James is calling 'Silent Cal.' "Yeah?"

"Are we going to live here now?"

"What would you think about that?" She sips her coffee, tries to ignore the pain pulsing through the blood vessels in her head.

"Um... That would be OK. Where are all the other people, though?"

"The people from the island?" She feels a tightness in her lungs but keeps her face calm.

"Yeah."

"I guess they're all still there, buddy."

"But... So, we just left and went away and then we went to Aunt Rachel's and then we left and went away from there too. So aren't we going somewhere again after this?"

"We're going to stay here now."

"For always?"

"I hope so." She wishes she could figure out exactly what James still sees in her. She used to ask herself that in Dharma in the beginning, too, but she'd been more sure of herself then. Or maybe then she'd been less afraid of what it meant to find redemption in another person. In someone who'd never seen her as anything other than who she was. He was probably the first person she'd ever known who'd expected nothing from her, who'd used her for nothing. Who'd only wanted her for her.

"Can Alice come visit?"

"No. She can't. But Aunt Rachel can. And Julian and Brian. Did you know Brian's going to become your uncle? In January."

"Yeah. Julian said so. Hey, can we call Julian after breakfast?"

"Of course we can. Maybe after we'll go pick out some stuff for your new room here, OK? You're going to have your very own room upstairs."

"Mama?"

"Mmm-hmm?"

He says it so quietly she can barely hear time. "This is kind of weird."

She looks at her son in this kitchen of the Perpetually-Needing-to-be-Washed Floor, a pile of cat toys in the corner, the jars of spices lined up on the counter. She feels like every time she looks around, she sees more evidence of a home, of a life, of a family living, and she's still not sure if she's on the outside of this or how, exactly, she's supposed to wedge herself in, as if between the pages of a book. Finally she says, "Yeah, it is kind of weird."

"It's sort of quiet but then also sort of noisy. And there's a lot of... stuff. Like shoes and books and stuff. Can Christopher come visit? Why couldn't he have lived with us?"

"Because he just couldn't, buddy. No one can come visit us from there."

He's poking at his oatmeal with his spoon. "But James left the island."

Sometimes this kid really is too smart for his own good. She reminds herself to discourage him from a career in physics. "That's just different."

"Why?"

Ugh, once they got into loops of _Why?_, this would never end. He wasn't a big talker, but once he got going, he could make her brain hurt worse than the headaches. "Because I did something special to help him come back here."

"So why couldn't you do that for Alice and Joe and Christopher and everyone?"

"I could only do it one time. And James is your dad, so he was very important. You understand?"

"Yes," he says, a little stubbornly.

"You know you can call him Dad if you want to, right?"

"Yes."

"OK. Just checking."

* * *

James goes back to work on Tuesday. She takes Jonah to the park, pushes him on the swings, plays with him on the monkey bars, like she's exactly the sort of mother who _wouldn't _get drunk with her time-traveling adult son.

On Wednesday night she goes out to the deck with her phone. "Hi, John, it's Juliet again. Sorry for bothering you. Don't, um, don't, um.... We need to go over some things. Please call me back, all right? It's important."

On Thursday night it rains. James deals out the cards on the coffee table. "I don't hear practicin'!" he yells in the direction of the basement stairs, and a moment later the clarinet starts up again.

"Slavedriver," Juliet mutters as she picks up her cards, looks them over.

"You're just bitter you couldn't have been a band geek back then. Way too cool for ya, tall basketball girl."

She glares at him for all of a half-second and drops her chips into the middle of the table. "You forgot science club. Ante."

"Was tryin' to spare you some humiliation. You know, other than the humiliation I'm about to put ya through here." He nods down at the table and drops five chips down. "Raise."

She drops more chips down, takes a sip of wine. "About tomorrow." She slaps two of her cards facedown on the table. "Two."

He parcels out two new cards. "Yeah, I been meanin' to ask you about that." He glances at his cards. "I'm takin' two, as well."

"Does Cassidy know yet? About us staying?"

"Yeah. Told her yesterday."

"And?"

"And she's dealin'. If you don't wanna be there for the handoff, that's OK. We can do it another time."

"I don't know. It's probably just better to get it over with, don't you think?"

"Listen, I told her, no steamrollin' you, but Cass ain't real fond of listening to instructions, especially from me."

"I've handled worse than Cassidy." She lays down her cards.

He cringes. "Shit."

She sweeps the pile of chips toward her side of the table. "I can't believe you put yourself up to this humiliation time and time again."

* * *

The following night he's walking on the fucking moon. Frankly, it had all gone better than he'd expected. Cassidy had raised her eyebrows when she saw Juliet, and he felt a surge of obnoxiously selfish pride that this absolutely fucking gorgeous woman could possibly want to be with him. Of course, Cass didn't know that Juliet was just as good on the inside as the out, but an emotional mess or not, she was _his_ mess.

Juliet, of course, put on her perfectly soothing Other Brainwashing Voice, and Cassidy seemed mollified, although she'd narrowed her eyes when Clementine jumped down the stairs and said, "Bye! OK, let's go, Mom!" That wasn't exactly her typical M.O., but then again, Clem wasn't used to being away from her mother for two entire weeks, either, and he tries to tell himself that's all it is. It's a wonderful lie that almost works.

At any rate, Cassidy looked tanned, happy and well-rested, and was obviously not in a fighting mood. She nodded at them while she hugged Clementine and muttered to her, "Go hug your dad good-bye."

Clem has never done so begrudgingly before. When they'd first been getting to know each other she'd refused to hug him at first, then she'd done so shyly, then finally with happy abandon. Now she leans over on her tiptoes and he gives her a quick pat on the back because he knows that's all she wants.

But when he stands at the door and watches Cassidy back her SUV down the driveway, Juliet's hand is on his back. "It will get better," she tells him.

He turns and buries his face in what seems like acres of blond hair. "I know. Same goes double for you."

She tightens her grip on him. "I know."


	40. Experiments in Real Life

**Happy holidays, everyone! I'll be traveling so it might be a week before this is updated again, but we'll see how it goes.**

* * *

_"He cut through the Milky Way, right through the stars and stardust. He went around the universe in a giant circle. And then he landed, with a quiet thud, back in his yard."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

He finds her sitting on the floor in the bedroom with the laptop resting on those gorgeous legs of hers. Her face is flushed and her hand is pressed to her mouth, her shoulders shaking. At first he thinks she's crying but her eyes meet his and he realizes she's laughing, hard.

"What's so funny, Chuckles?"

"YouTube is awesome," she chokes out behind giggles.

"You ever seen LOLcats?" he asks before he sits, and they spend the next hour laughing at stupid crap on the Internet.

* * *

The day she discovers he belongs to a gym, she doesn't even try to hide her laughter.

"Well, some of us ain't as young as we used to be," he grumbles.

"Do you carry around one of those little white towels?" she manages to say before giving into giggles again.

* * *

One night he knocks on the bathroom door when he hears the shower running, calls her name. She tells him to come in a tone that makes him think he'd rather not, after all. He checks over his shoulder for wayward offspring and then ducks inside.

She's in the middle of the steamy bathroom, completely naked, her hair slipping down around her breasts. And she's mopping the floor. His eyebrows go about as high as they can possibly go. "Well, you've just fulfilled every man's fantasy right here."

She points a finger at him like she wishes it were a gun. "You don't get to speak," she says, and thrusts the mop at him, folding her arms.

The floor looks pretty damn clean from where he stands, although it's true he's spending most of his time staring at naked Juliet. Finally he manages to give the floor a once-over with the mop, looks up at her questioningly.

"I was getting in the shower and you know what happened? _I stepped in cat pee_."

Now it's his turn to laugh, and James laughs until she starts taking off his clothes, and then he forgets what was so damned funny in the first place.

* * *

She replaces the brake pads on his Jeep and throws in an oil change as a special bonus. "That ain't the kinda 'special bonus' I was looking for, sweetheart," he drawls, and she smears a greasy finger across his cheek.

* * *

They continue to slowly, painstakingly, miraculously crawl their way back toward each other. There's a brief panicky phase where they do everything together, afraid to let each other out of sight. As if this could all be snatched away.

After she turns in her rental car, she drives him to work every day in his Jeep. He calls her at lunchtime, during his break, at the end of the day when he's ready for her to come back for him. (He will always be ready for her to come back to him.) They bring Clementine to camp, to her friends' houses, take Jonah for immunizations, start the paperwork to legally change his last name from Tobin to Ford, even though his original birth certificate was, after all, a hoax, and his age is off by months. They celebrate his (fake) sixth birthday just for the hell of it, to get their heads around it all.

And so they shop for groceries, load the dishwasher, go to the post office. They set up their chairs on the grass at Friday night movies and lace their fingers like Alex and Karl used to. She goes with him to when he wants to get a haircut. They read two different books but swap every other night, almost afraid to have new experiences without the other. Even on paper.

She starts sleeping in his shirts. They sleep differently now than they had in Dharma, facing each other, curled like parentheses, limbs twined like ivy. In the past he would have considered sleeping in this way to seem weirdly obsessive and uncomfortable. But now he's gripped by panic at the though of not feeling her warm breath on his shoulder while they sleep.

There can be no letting go, not ever again.

* * *

Sometimes when she tells him that she really is all right, he thinks about what a great liar she's always been.

* * *

She sits on the top step of the back deck, dipping her spoon into a cup of yogurt. He stands at the door, watching her back (_Still got my back?_) and when he finally steps outside, she turns and gifts him with a dazzling smile. At first he thinks it's meant all for him, but then she says, "I had no idea how much I missed yogurt."

"You're goin' gaga over the lamest foods. Seriously, don't you want, like, a cheeseburger?"

"I'm not going to say no to that. What was the first thing you ate after you remembered?"

"After the truckload of booze, you mean?"

"Touche." She licks the back of her yogurt spoon, remembering. Finally she says, "Oreos. I think I would have killed for Oreos when I was pregnant."

"You know, I can't even picture you pregnant," he muses.

She points her spoon at him. "Good, keep it that way. I'm not that good at performing vasectomies."

* * *

Juliet buys a used Subaru Outback (dark blue, like her old Volvo) to fit in among the other moms in the neighborhood. James repeatedly objects to her choice -- first on the grounds that he doesn't need anything hanging around that reminds him of Australia, and second that he doesn't want her to join Portland's port-grunge yuppie-mom army. Which, of course, is _exactly_ what she's trying to do in the first place.

She probably should have listened because the fucking thing almost instantly identifies itself as a lemon. But unlike the other moms in the neighborhood, she simply squares her shoulders and goes down to the auto parts store.

After her third trip in two days, the employees there start calling her by name. Not her real name, of course. But it's something.

(She's starting to feel less translucent.)

* * *

When the school year begins, she volunteers to pick up Clementine from field hockey twice a week, every week. Clementine isn't wild about the idea, but it would be a struggle for James to make it in time, and Cassidy needs to juggle her job with picking up her little girls from daycare.

The first day Juliet eases her Outback up the long gravel driveway of Cassidy's house, her fingers are wrapped impossibly tight around the steering wheel. Cassidy nods her thanks from the front porch, trying to untangle her toddler's grasping hands from her hair.

Juliet nods back and offers a small smile as a peace offering.

* * *

Some days she's laid out with headaches, her palms pressed over her eyes like a sad and desperate prayer, and he wants her to see a neurologist. But she tells him once again, they're not that kind of headaches, and he knows what she means now.

And she pretends that she doesn't see his fear.

* * *

"So what should I be now that I'm all grown up?" she asks him.

"Stick with me, sweetheart, and I'll teach you everything you've always wanted to know about runnin' cons in the real world."

"That sounds thrilling." She smiles, but he sees she's almost afraid to say the next part. Hesitates. "Maybe I should go to school to become a nurse or a physician's assistant. Blood draws and throat cultures. There's no way in hell I'm doing med school again. God, I'm even going to need to get a G.E.D." She rolls her eyes to demonstrate accepted defeat. All her years of education, her lab, her research, her fucking dreams, down the drain.

And for what? So she could end up virtually imprisoned and forced to witness death over and over at what seemed like her own hands? At least Julian existed. Maybe that was the whole purpose of that and now she could just forget the rest of it had ever happened.

"You sure you need to stay under the radar still?"

"I feel like -- I'll know when it's safe. And it's not safe yet. If it ever is. I don't even know if I'd even want to be a doctor anymore."

"Mechanic? You looked pretty hot in those navy blue jumpsuits." He can see she's going to need him to turn this into a joke.

She arches an eyebrow, right on cue. "I love it when you talk Dharma to me."

"Listen, Jules, we can get by, if, you know. You don't know what to do. I'm sure Clementine's ready to start up a gig as a professional interrogator by now. She could probably bring in a lotta dough."

"Richard gave me enough to live on for awhile, so I don't need to be totally dependent on you just yet. We could always have Rachel finally declare me dead. Get into my 401K, life insurance."

"No, Jules, don't do that." He can't think of Juliet Burke as dead, even though she's sitting right in front of him. He needs to touch her, moves closer, rests a hand on her knee. Still not close enough. He wants to pause this; suddenly he just needs to be inside of her, and he forces himself to pay attention to their conversation again.

"I know. I wouldn't want Rachel to incriminate herself if I ever got caught. And I guess I've committed enough crimes. I don't need to add insurance fraud to it all."

"I was thinkin' because maybe someone this'll all be over."

She raises her eyes to his. "That's the spirit."

"Yeah, well. I try."

"Hmm. Maybe I could write science-fiction novels under an assumed name."

"You get any more identities, I'm gonna start callin' you Sybill."

"Oh, wow, you make up nicknames for people!"

"You need to stop talking to Miles so damn much. He's startin' to have an effect on you."

* * *

"Stick with me, and..." She notices that expression creeping into his speech again and again, like he's constantly trying to strike a deal with her. She marvels at the fact that he always seems to need some sort of promise from her.

And she marvels that he hasn't realized he's gotten it already.

* * *

He's sitting in front of the TV playing Mario Kart with the boy, who's really getting freakishly good at the damn thing. Juliet's sprawled sideways across the armchair, her legs hanging over the armrest, reading Everything Is Illuminated. ("Could you possibly have found anything _more_ depressin'?" he'd asked her. "It's _your_ book," she'd pointed out.)

"Hey, Mama?" the kid asks, not taking his eyes from the game.

"Yeah, buddy?"

"After this can we call Julian and Aunt Rachel?"

"Well, it's pretty late over there by now. Remember, it's earlier here. Why don't we call them tomorrow?"

"OK. And then can we call Alice?"

A long pause. "We can't call Alice."

"Why not? You said we can't see her anymore, so I think we should just call her."

A longer pause. James watches her out of the corner of his eye but she doesn't seem to be reacting in any outward way. "There aren't any phones on the island that we could use."

"Oh. So tomorrow, let's go to the store and we can buy her a phone and mail it to her."

"Buddy, I'll be right back, OK?" She tosses the book on the ottoman and walks slowly up the stairs.

They finish their round and start up a new one while James tries to figure out what to say to Jonah. He listens to her pace the floor above them, once and then twice. "Y'know, I think your mom is sad about Alice. Maybe it would be a good idea if you didn't ask her about her anymore."

"Oh. Why?"

"Dunno, shortstack. Just got a feelin'." But he's already hearing Juliet's footsteps coming down the stairs again.

She sits on the arm chair, tucking a leg underneath herself. "James, pause the game, please. Jonah, come over here." She used the kid's real name. He's noticed she only does that when it's Serious Business. Jonah pouts and flops onto the ottoman, and Juliet glances at James for a half-second and then leans forward. "I'm going to tell you something really sad about Alice now, all right?"

"All right," Jonah says uncertainly.

Gently, she asks, "You know what it means when someone is dead, right?"

"Like Christopher's mom and dad."

"That's right." She touches her lips for a long moment, and he knows she doesn't want to say what comes next.

* * *

She runs.

She runs every morning after Jonah's at school and she drops James at work. Most days she cuts through the field behind the high school, the treads on her sneakers clotted with mud. Upon her return she leaves her shoes at the back door. Sometimes she forgets to bring them inside after her shower, and instead finds herself pulling them on, stiff and cold, out on the deck the following morning.

"So why runnin'?" he asks her one night.

"Well, swimming's sort of lost its appeal by now." What she means is, it feels good to be running once you're not being chased.

It takes the edge off, though. (Sometimes he even sees her blink.)

* * *

He watches her staring at the water in the sink, doesn't ask what that's all about, because he knows what she's thinking.

* * *

One morning he clatters downstairs and she's standing completely still in the middle of the kitchen, holding a hand to her cheek. She turns to the doorway and beams. "I think I have a cavity."

"And you're a sick and twisted Hostile to look that happy about it."

"James! I have a _cavity._ I haven't had a cavity since -- since before the island." She closes her eyes, triumphant. "It's losing its hold on me. It has to be." The moment is short-lived, and her eyes pop open. She's afraid.

"What?"

"I should see a doctor. Rachel was diagnosed before she was 30. My mom was dead by 50." She locks eyes with him, her face unreadable. "The island gave Ben cancer."

Her test results come back clear, she's negative for the breast cancer gene, and that night they get a baby-sitter and he takes her out. She sips her wine and tells him that Rachel's cancer had never come back at all. That Jacob had done nothing, had been asked for nothing, and how she ended up never believing Ben even at the times she probably should have.

And she goes to the dentist the next morning while he's at work. Later she tells him she was indeed sick and twisted to be happy about having a cavity, and he catches her flossing that night.

* * *

They can't keep their hands off each other, every spare moment they're on each other like they're trying to break a curse. The weeks that Clem is with Cassidy, they put Jonah to bed early and play the stereo a little too loud.

He's amazed at the things he's forgotten about her, but that just makes remembering all the better. The way she presses her thumbs against the pulse points below his jaw while they kiss, the shiver she gives him when he sucks on the inside of her elbow. The way her face starts twitching when she's close and how he can kiss her neck to get her to let her guard down. The way she whispers his name against his mouth.

Late one afternoon when Jonah's playing with his new friend across the street, James finds Juliet in the pantry. He smirks thinking about their house in Dharma and that pantry there, and before he finishes the thought he's tugging at her hips, pulling her against him. The arm of her shirt gets caught over the box of pasta she'd still been holding and she opens her palm, letting it drop to the floor with a rattle. When they're as close to naked as they're gonna get, he lifts her up against the wall and she wraps those amazing legs around him. It's quiet and urgent but she grabs at his hair, gasping into the semi-darkness, and he buries his face in the warm curve of her neck, surprised to feel his own tears pooling there.

* * *

He hasn't seen her cry since that first morning, and he keeps waiting for her to implode like the Hatch. Instead it's as if she's slowly pouring cement into her foundations, and he's searching for the cracks to find a way in.

* * *

One night he catches her putting Neosporin on the scar over her collarbone. Their eyes lock in the mirror. "Lookin' better these days," he says even though he knows nothing about it.

Her eyes drift back to her reflection. "On the island it would probably be almost gone already. But I left right after it happened."

"That must've hurt like a bitch."

She shrugs and looks away.

* * *

She stalks into the bathroom wearing a pair of his pajama pants, which are ridiculously big on her and barely hanging on by the drawstring. "Well, hey there, droopy drawers," he smirks, eyeing the tantalizing inch of flesh between the bottom of her tank top and the waistband of his stolen pants.

She doesn't smile, reaches for the toothpaste. "We need to do laundry."

"Well, judgin' by your present appearance, I'd say you need to do laundry."

She practically strangles the tube of Crest, giving her toothbrush a death glare the entire time.

Another of the many joys involved in living with Juliet: PMS. He can't believe he'd forgotten that one.

* * *

On September 22, he wakes to realize that an _extremely_ interesting part of his anatomy is in her mouth, and he doesn't know to what he owes the pleasure (literally), but he's not exactly in the mood to ask questions right about now.

Instead, he just entwines his fingers in her hair, panting, and thanks the universe (for about the billionth time) that all of this is real.

Afterward she pulls herself up, smirking a little bit at his stoned expression, and tucks herself against his side. When he can finally remember his name again, he pants, "What the hell was that for?"

He sees surprise flicker across her eyes but then she shakes her head and smiles. "Just wanted you to have a good day today."

He doesn't know what she means until he sees the date on his cell phone that afternoon. Anniversary of the Oceanic crash or not, he decides she'll have a really good day _tomorrow_. Just for the hell of it.

* * *

She's in the bathroom putting on mascara and catches him watching her from the doorway. "What the hell are you doin'?"

"I took Clementine to Target after practice today," she says a little sheepishly. "And she made me get some stuff."

"I doubt a 12-year-old kid could _make_ you do _anythin_'."

"I'm sorry, do you even know Clementine?" she asks. She leans toward the mirror again and touches the wand to her lashes again.

"OK, lemme see."

She finishes and turns. He pretends to inspect her critically. "You'll pass," he decides.

"Gee, thanks, how charitable of you. This is weird though. I haven't worn any makeup in I don't even know how long."

"Yeah, well, I ain't never worn any and I turned out all right."

"Well, that's debatable." She makes a tiny turn toward him and he catches a devious glimmer in her eyes. It's hardly registered in his brain before she's grinning and reaching for him with the mascara wand.

He runs like hell.

* * *

Some nights she dreams she's falling. Some nights he dreams she lets go.

* * *

One night she wakes up him, clinging to his hand like she does in their worst nightmares. He struggles to regain his senses. "Jules, what is it?"

"I'm supposed to remember something," she says desperately. It always seems worse in the dark.

"Whaddya mean?" he asks, trying to hold her even though she won't let go of his hand.

She sits up in the dark, watching the moonlight on the bed. "Jacob said so. Years ago. I was supposed to remember to do something. And I left that island without ever doing it. I keep thinking that maybe if I'd remembered, maybe everything wouldn't have gone so wrong in the end." She drops his hand.

"You don't know that," he tries.

She shakes her head. "I keep trying and trying to forget everything else, and I can't. And the one thing I was supposed to remember -- I don't even think I knew it in the first place." Her face almost crumples, but she doesn't cry, and she folds her arms around her bent knees in the dark. And, oh, she is haunted.


	41. Everything I've Told You Is True

_"Don't wait to be sure. Move, move, move."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

**Monday, October 14, 2013**

James scrapes muddy leaves from the bottoms of his shoes and steps into the house. He yells to Clem and Maddie from the bottom of the stairs, telling them that Maddie's parents are outside, hears Juliet's yelp of protest from the kitchen.

He comes around the corner into the kitchen to find her eyes narrowed, her books and papers spread out across the kitchen table. "Jonah's asleep," she points out. "Or, he was."

"Aw, crap. Well -- wait a sec. You got all dolled up just to sit home alone tonight?" He squints even though he's still wearing his glasses (damn bifocals), certain Juliet's hair had been curly when he'd left to meet Cassidy at parent-teacher night at Clem's school. But now her hair's shiny, smooth, straightened with just a slight upturn at the bottom.

"Oh, you missed a lot of fun here tonight," she answers with sarcastic cheer. "It was makeover night!" She holds out her hands, grinning; her fingernails are painted light blue. With sparkles. _Sparkles_. James starts to laugh; he is fairly certain that Juliet and sparkles have never been in the same room before this night. "You should see your son," she says. "And speaking of your son, good job steering this conversation away from my concern that you might have woken -- "

They hear Maddie clatter down the stairs in the living room. "Bye, Mr. Ford! Bye, Jules! Thanks!" The front door slams.

_"Jules?"_

"Oh, don't mind me, I'm just the help." She slides a manila envelope from under her notebook, holds it out to him. "Got something in the mail today."

The return address indicates it's from the state of Oregon. He slides out the paperwork to see that the Board of Education has awarded Leah C. Tobin her general equivalency diploma in high school. Juliet's eyes are suddenly huge and sad as she looks away from him. "Hey, now," he says, leaning down to kiss her. "This is a good thing. It means you can move on to whatever you want now, physics queen."

"At least they know I can solve for x, right?" She braves a small smile.

"Mama?" The boy's standing in the doorway and Juliet flashes James a knowing look. They've been here just under three months and sometimes he still finds himself forgetting they're really here. He never would have called for Maddie that loudly after Little J's bedtime if he'd remembered in that instant. Feels a shiver of guilt, wrapped up with gratitude and love.

The moment expires when James realizes Jonah's short hair is spiky with gel. And is that black nail polish on his fingers? He bites back a laugh at Clementine and Maddie's sense of style. "Hey there shortstack, I wake you up?"

The kid nods. "Can I have a glass of water? I'm thirsty. And I think I need another story to fall asleep."

Juliet smirks up at him. "Yeah, buddy. Dad will help you." She turns back to her books. A couple days ago, she'd brought this stack back from the library, almost all physics texts or popular science titles like The Elegant Universe. ("String theory," she'd said about that one. "Physics couldn't possibly be further from my area of expertise." He'd countered, "Whaddya talking about, you know where -- uh, when -- you were livin' the past nine years?" She'd tossed her car keys on the counter and grinned at him. "Well, it's not like we were taking midterm exams on a regular basis. Besides, this from someone who won't even allow A Brief History of Time in the _house_." End of discussion.)

She has this one book, though, a picture-heavy tome on World War II in the Pacific, that doesn't seem to fit in with the rest. He hasn't asked her about it and she hasn't volunteered anything; they navigate daily around what he knows and the secrets she still carries. Some nights under the cover of darkness, she tells him she's not a good person and every time he hears this, he says he doesn't believe her. But what the hell does he really know about it, anyway?

Jonah sits next to Juliet while James moves toward the counter. He's reaching for a glass when he sees the kid lean down to the book and ask Juliet something unintelligible.

James thinks he's hearing things until Juliet starts to answer the kid with something equally unintelligible and he realizes they're speaking Latin.

------ FLASHBACK (1923) ------

She was standing to the back of the crowd, all of them dressed in their white mourning clothes, watching as some of her people (they _were_ her people, whether she liked it or not) guided the raft off along the water, lighting it aglow when they were far enough out. When she felt the hand on her shoulder she nearly jumped a mile. "Hey," Nicholas whispered.

"Hey," she managed. "You scared me."

"Sorry." He nodded off toward the water. "What happened? Who is it?"

"Cecelia. She -- it was a redo. I couldn't stop the bleed." She ground her teeth together, remembering the aching powerlessness of it all, watching as every beat of Cecelia's heart forced more blood from her wounds. Juliet felt tired suddenly, so tired.

"Dammit, when are they going to get us a real surgeon? What are they even thinking?"

She shrugged, her face turned toward the water. Toward what used to be Cecelia.

"Jules, don't blame yourself. I'm sure you did everything you could." He reached out to hug her and she forced herself not to flinch even though every cell in her body was reacting with alarm. She broke contact as quickly as she thought she could without raising suspicion in him. The problem with never asking questions was that now that she wanted to, needed to, there was no way she'd be able to do it without chancing the fact that he'd catch on. Where the hell did he keep going? Was Richard right? There was no way he was supposed to be traveling -- Alice had purposely taken him out of the rotation due to his nosebleeds.

And he hadn't been traveling with any of the other groups, not David's and obviously not Richard's. She'd checked, as discreetly as she'd been able to. There was no one else among them that had the authority to be sending him anywhere. And even the four keyholders -- well, three, excluding Richard, of course -- were forbidden from traveling without authorization from at least one other except in an emergency. The keys that those four wore all the time worked for both their arsenal and an underground station that precisely controlled time for individuals. When they couldn't or wouldn't turn back the clock, for whatever reason, someone stayed dead, like Cecilia. In today's case, Juliet suspected the gains they'd made in battle were worth a few minor sacrifices. But her whole face ached from not crying.

The other time station was almost the opposite of the Orchid, although at times she had to remind herself there _was_ no Orchid yet -- just the well and the frozen wheel itself. Again and again, she'd contemplated just taking Jonah and running for it, but she didn't know how to work the wheel. It hadn't exactly granted John Locke abundant good fortune. And with her luck they'd have ended up in the 1400s or in the middle of the Arctic or something.

In the dark Nicholas' hand found hers as they watched the end of the funeral ceremony and she pressed her toes forcefully down into her shoes so she could bear it, realizing in that moment that she thought Richard was right about him. She didn't even want Nicholas to touch her. She decided to chance one question, casually. "Everything go OK for you today?"

He sighed. "Not really." He didn't elaborate.

"I guess a lot of that is going around lately." She watched the blaze on the water ahead of them, fire on water like her thudding heart under her cool exterior.

"Where's Jonah tonight?"

She hesitated. If she wanted to be a good little spy, she'd play Bond Girl and go back him him to his tent, get the information out of him in the best and trickiest moves she could possibly play. She remembered when James had sheepishly told her about Ana-Lucia, and exactly how she'd managed to steal his gun. At the time Juliet had laughed and teased him. Now she half-wished she had the gumption, but another part of her just felt sick at the thought. How could she sleep with Nicholas for every possible reason except love? And yet now she wasn't able to sleep with him when it seemed to be getting more vital by the moment that she find out whatever she can? She almost feels her blood boiling at the thought that this could be exactly what Richard wanted her to do.

Except she had lost pieces of herself time and time again, she had almost nothing fucking left, except her life and her son and maybe one paper-thin shred of integrity, if she even could claim to have that. And she couldn't give herself over to him in that way. Not for information she may or may not be able to get without him catching on. She just couldn't. "Elspeth has him, but I have to go pick him up tonight."

Nicholas sighed. "All right. Just seems since she has little Chris there that one more won't make much of a difference."

"Trust me, it does."

They were halfway back through the jungle when the familiar clanking of chains started uprooting trees in the distance. "Nick, run!" Juliet hissed.

He hesitated.

"Just go! You know it won't hurt me. Go!"

He finally nodded and took off toward their village. Juliet stood where she was, tilted her head.

The thing skidded to a stop in front of her.

_What do you want. I'm getting sick of this._

_Just thought you should know._

_What._

_I'm winning. You're going to help me win. And that's a good thing. Thank you._

_I'm not doing a damn thing for you._

_Your little friend over there is doing plenty._

Her eyes flicked back over the path that Nicholas had left on._ I don't believe you._

_Fine. Don't. Just thought I would say thank you._

_Don't you fucking thank me for anything._

_So, so angry. Is that any way to talk to me. I did save your life, but instead you think my brother is everything. He's trying to destroy this island. I'm the one trying to save it._

_And again, I don't believe you._

_You won't even hear me out._

_No._

_But being loyal to him, you're always so sad. So angry. If you work for me again, if you'll do it willingly, we can save this island together. If you won't work for me, it will take a lot longer. And it will be... decidedly more unpleasant for you._

_Go away._

_Are you this rude to my brother too._

_Yes, I am, actually. I don't enjoy mind games. Literally, I suppose. Go away._

_But Juliet._

_What._

_Everything I've told you is true._

The smoke evaporated. Slowly the sounds of the jungle began to inhabit her hearing again, the cracking twigs from the footfalls of others leaving the funeral. Her breathing evened out, and she remembered, again, just how tired she was. And how angry. The smoke was right about that.

And she was fucking furious with Richard with dumping his theory on her yesterday and then just flat-out disappearing today.

She returned to the village, nodded to Nicholas across the clearing, fetched Jonah from Elspeth and Christopher's. Little Chris was already sleeping and Jonah had been close to it. She hefted him into her arms, his tiny sleepy body feeling so solid and comforting in her arms. She pushed away a sharp stab of longing for James.

Elspeth and Christopher asked her some about Cecelia, but they were too sad, Jonah too tired and she was too drained to speak for very long. She brought Jonah home, put him to bed. Her head ached. The brothers were fighting again and the winds whipped up around her cabin, branches smacking into the long wall opposite the door. She watched the dark ceiling intently, silently asked for sleep. But sleep took a long time coming.

* * *

In the end, she didn't know what to do, so she did nothing.

Before, she'd always needed to have a plan. (She remembered the day she'd made the video, the flashcards to show Jack in the Hydra; who had she been back then, plotting to kill Ben, back in the days before she'd just grab a gun like it was nothing?) But she was sick of this all, sick of not knowing what the hell was going on and frustrated with herself for never, ever asking questions.

So in the morning she went looking for Nicholas, but when Dottie told her that he'd walked off toward the beach, she decided not to follow. Her heart was full of hurt and she was frustrated, so tired of being used by everyone, for everything except what she herself needed or wanted. And if Nicholas wasn't feeding information to the other side, then she would just continue to resent Richard for putting her in this situation. Then again, if she really wanted to blame everyone but herself, maybe she should blame Alice for pushing her to Nicholas so hard in the first place... at which point she decided that her train of thought was completely unproductive.

She spent a somewhat solitary day rolling bandages, sorting medical supplies and helping Jonah with the alphabet. And all the examples he got that day were, for once, in English. When Alice was around Jonah she was always teaching him Latin words, and it drove Juliet insane.

Ordinarily, she probably would have been pleased at having a moderately productive day, especially with all this anger and confusion twisting inside her, but instead she was impatient for Alice's return, or Richard's. Or even Nick's, if she could ever decide what to do. In late afternoon she decided to take Jonah up to the creek, but the smoke monster showed up on their path. She ended up even more furious when she took Jonah and tried to run -- she wasn't afraid of the smoke anymore, but she'd be damned if she was exposing her son to that mess. Of course, as soon as she'd slammed the overhead door of the bunker, the smoke had seeped in anyway, started taking those blinding-white flashes so reminiscent of a camera. She kept her hand clamped over Jonah's eyes while silently cursing the smoke. It helped a little when she remembered the smoke could read her mind, and she amped up her nonverbal assault until it finally left them.

"No creek after all, today," she told him as they walked home.

They stayed up late that night; she read him extra stories and he laid with his head on her stomach. She watched as his eyes dropped closed, and before she even thought about reaching over to put out the lantern, she was asleep, too.

The next thing she knew, someone was shaking her arm violently. Her gasp was cut off by a hand clamped down over her mouth and the sensation of a face hovering directly over hers. Her eyes met Alice's in the dark but she didn't relax.

"Sorry to scare you," Alice whispered. "Come on, we need to go."

"Go where?"

"Something went wrong. Really, _really_ bloody wrong. David is dead. We've got to turn back the clock and we have almost no time. Come on, Jules, wake up, I need you."

Juliet was already standing and reaching for her clothes, though still not quite fully awake. "David is dead? What? Alice... His key, who's got his key?" she mumbled.

"Richard. He was right there when he fell."

Relief was short-lived. She was dressed in seconds and scooped Jonah into her arms. They were halfway out the door when Alice said, "Wait! You have any guns in here?"

Juliet found herself adopting a tone she'd rarely used with Alice. It was more of the Juliet-must-educate-poor-silly-Miles tone of voice. "Alice, I have a three-year-old son. Of course I don't have any guns in here."

"Well, we're going to have to stop at the arsenal after we take him to Dottie. It needs to be quick, but we need to -- I have about four bullets left."

Juliet had already tuned her out, setting off toward Elspeth's cabin.

"Jules -- Dottie. Not Elspeth."

"Dottie? No, I'll take him to Elspeth."

Alice grabbed her elbow, roughly. "Jules! Take him to Dottie," she said forcefully.

"What? No, Elspeth will watch him."

"JULES! Are you bloody listening to me? Elspeth is dead! OK? Elspeth and Christopher are dead. Little Chris is at Dottie's. We're taking Jonah there. Dottie will know if she needs to run. Just _listen_ to me."

Juliet was temporarily immobilized, and then Alice was pulling her in the opposite direction, and then they were pounding on Dottie's door and Juliet was depositing Jonah in Dottie's arms, and lighting the torch that Alice shoved into her hands.

They took off into the jungle on a narrow path, Alice leading Juliet, their feet moving independently of their brains. There was no time to cut vines or move brush out of their way, and they bobbed and ducked like fighters in a boxing ring as they thundered through the greenery, punished or rewarded with scrapes and cuts. They were halfway to the arsenal when the skies opened up.

"Of course!" Juliet groaned. The torch in her hand started to steam slightly.

"Just keep going!" Alice yelled.

Well, that was a stupid statement. What did she think, Juliet would just sit down and set up camp and give up because it was raining? Juliet shook her head slightly to get her brain back on the issues at hand. A keyholder -- David -- was dead? Elspeth and Christopher? But Christopher was supposed to be giving her another tracking lesson tomorrow. She and Elspeth were taking their boys to the beach on Friday. How could they be dead? Chris didn't have parents anymore? He was only four years old! What the hell had happened?

As if Alice could read her mind, she yelled over her shoulder. "Someone knew we were going to be there."

Juliet couldn't remember how to speak, all she could hear was the rain pounding down around them. Why had she done nothing, she'd _always_ had a plan before ending up back here, always always always had a plan, why had she just given up and done nothing, nothing? Was it really Nicholas? This didn't mean anything, didn't mean it was him, it could have been someone else, right? If Richard had really thought so, wouldn't he at least have tried to take his key away? But if it was Nicholas -- if David and Elspeth and Christopher and however many others were dead and they stayed dead, was it her fault? Yes, yes of course. She didn't know how she was still running; she half-expected to trip over her shock and disbelief at any moment. She wished she could evaporate into the air like nothing (_I did nothing, I'm already nothing_), evaporate like black smoke curling upward.

Then they were skidding to a halt outside the double doors of the arsenal, Alice fumbling with the chain around her neck. Juliet had never seen Alice so rattled, her hands were shaking so badly that she dropped the key, bent to pick it up. Juliet held out her free hand, her steady doctor's hand, received the key from Alice, slid it into the heavy lock. They each pulled back a creaking door and Juliet lifted the torch higher, not sure they believed what they were seeing.

The smooth earthen walls, swept clean. The floor, blank. Everything gone, everything emptied.

"Bloody hell," Juliet whispered.

"Oh," said Alice, "we're fucking screwed."

* * *

**Hey all, I'm back! Please leave a review! A request if you don't mind -- I was really pleased with the way the previous chapter turned out, but I know it was over the holidays and everyone was busy. However, if you're so inclined to go back and leave a review on Chapter 40, you would make my day! Hope you all had great holidays.**


	42. Keys

_"My mind slows down to a rate that would not be considered functional for any other job. I am alive only one out of every four seconds, I register only fifteen minutes out of the hour."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

------ FLASHBACK CONTINUED (1923) ------

They were frozen at the doors of the arsenal, the sound of the pouring rain echoing through the empty room in front of them.

Juliet turned her head without moving her eyes from the smooth earthen walls. "Give me the gun, Alice," she said in a low voice, squeezing the jagged edges of the key into her palm so tightly that she felt the skin split.

"No."

She slid her eyes to Alice's face. "I said, give me the gun."

Her features were twisted with fear and anger. "And I said no! We have four bullets. Four! You're the better shot, Jules, but there's no bloody _way_ you're capable of doing what needs to be done."

She heard, in her memory, the sound of Danny Pickett's body hitting the sand. "You have no idea what I'm capable of."

"Fine. Keep the key. I'm keeping the gun. First things first, we turn back the clock, if we can. Then we find that bastard and give him what's coming to him."

"We don't know it's him," Juliet said, stalling for time.

"Who is it then, Jules? Are you daft? You think it's Richard? You think it's _me_? Come with me or don't, but I have to undo this damage. You don't come with me, I'm not defending you to Richard."

"What?"

"He wanted you to get information from Nick, did he not?"

Juliet wiped the rain from her face, didn't answer. "Let's just go."

Alice turned and stalked off. Juliet slammed the doors behind them, didn't even bother to lock them. She slipped the key over her neck, wiped her bleeding hand on her shirt. After a few steps they broke into a run. The jungle floor was slippery by now, slicked with mud. She thought, bizarrely, of Kate slugging her in the rain all those years before.

It was nearly morning by the time they reached the station; she could see a faint pinkness in the sky. Something cracked in the bushes beside them and she grabbed Alice's elbow. Of all the times for her to be unarmed.

Alice withdrew the gun.

The next thing Juliet knew, she was on the jungle floor as a ball of heat and flames erupted from the back of the station. Someone -- a man -- was running from the bushes and Alice squeezed off two wild shots before she gave up and let him go. "What the hell just happened?" Juliet hissed.

"Someone tried to blow up the station, obviously." Alice sprang to her feet. "Bloody imbeciles, they could have just tried to melt the lock. The station itself is forty feet down."

Alice kept the gun raised; Juliet crept around to the back of the entrance and circled back. "Al," she whispered. "No way were they trying to blow this up. This was a diversion."

Her eyes flickered nervously. "For what? I've got to get in there. Sun comes up and it's done and sealed."

Juliet took the key from her neck. "Trade you."

Alice glanced around the clearing and was extending the gun when her head snapped up and she whirled to the left. Nicholas was standing there with his right hand raised, up near his face. "You bastard," Alice swore. Juliet saw her fingers move to ensure the safety was still off.

"Wait a minute," he said.

Alice put her finger on the trigger. The way she was shaking, she'd never make the shot if she'd been any farther away. They only had two bullets left.

"Alice," Juliet tried.

"What?" she hissed through clenched teeth.

"We don't have any proof it's him."

Alice was already shaking her head. "Four keys, Juliet. Richard has two right now. You're holding one. Where's the other? Show us, Nick. Show us your key."

He didn't move.

"Juliet, check him."

Her feet moved forward independently of her brain. She wasn't making eye contact with either of them. Nicholas stayed immobilized; Alice kept the gun raised. Juliet slid her hand along the warm, moist skin of his neck just under his collar. Her fingers caught on the chain. She pulled it from the neck of his shirt; the key still dangled from it. Her mouth went dry.

"How do you know it's not Richard?" Nicholas asked her in a low voice.

She kept her eyes diverted. "I know it's not Richard. I knew him in the future."

"Then how do you know it's not Alice?"

Juliet raised her face to his.

"You know he'll say anything right now, Jules," Alice called. "Traitor trying to save his own skin."

"Do you think it's Alice?" she asked him expressionlessly.

"I don't know. Something's going on, for sure. I only know it's not me. What do _you_ think?" He looked directly into her eyes; it unnerved her.

"I think we need to take this to Richard," Juliet said, loud enough for them both to hear her.

"How come every time I wanted you to take something to Richard, you refused?" Alice challenged her. "We don't have time for this now."

Juliet was standing sideways, trying to watch them both at once. "I don't know."

"You know what I think, Jules?" Alice asked. "I think Nick's been fucking you to get informa--"

"That's not true!" he interrupted. "Alice! You _know_ that's not true."

Juliet was shaking her head before Alice had finished her sentence. She half-turned with her back to Nicholas, staying far enough away so he couldn't easily grab her. But close enough that Alice couldn't get a clear shot. "Al, you were always pushing me toward him." She realized her voice was trembling.

"Because he _told me_ he had feelings for you! What I did didn't come from nowhere, Nick knows that."

He shifted from one foot to another. "Alice, you've got it all wrong."

"We don't have time for this. Any of this! This sun's coming up. The sun comes up, they all stay dead. All those people you killed, Nick. All those people you _let_ die, Juliet."

Juliet was shaking her head. "No. No, no, no, Alice, you don't get to decide this. You don't get to decide who dies here."

Alice raised the gun an inch or so. "You both already _did!_ All right, Jules, let me ask you this. How much does he know? How much did you tell him, Jules? Did you tell him about Jacob? About everything he told you? Did you tell him more than me?"

Juliet hesitated.

"We decide together who dies here. We're in a bloody war, in case you've forgotten. How much did you tell him? Did you tell him enough to get everyone killed? To put your own son in danger? For what? So you could get laid once in awhile by someone you don't even love? Now let me ask you this. Who's been there for you from the beginning? From the first night you came out of that jungle? Him? Or me?"

She closed her eyes for a long moment. Alice sounded crazy. Angry and crazy. But it was the war. Alice had just seen half their camp die. Die because of something Juliet had done. Had failed to do. Richard had asked her to find out about Nicholas, take care of it all if needed. And she'd done nothing. She'd asked a couple casual questions, then rolled bandages and read stories to her son. Pretended nothing was happening. Pretended there wasn't a war going on all around them. Pretended she had no part in any of this. She opened her eyes. She could hear his rapid breathing behind her. She gave Alice the tiniest of nods, and took four steps to the right.


	43. Doubts

_"He breathed out the bitter air that makes women doubt everything, and I breathed it in, as I had always done. I expelled my dust, the powder of everything I had destroyed with doubt, and he pulled it into his lungs. My eyes were adjusting and I saw a man, an ordinary man, a stranger. We were staring into each other's eyes, and suddenly I felt furious. Go away, I whispered. Get out."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

------ FLASHBACK (1920) ------

She was wiping her cheeks furiously but the tears kept coming. Closed her eyes in quiet shame when she heard footsteps over the babbling of the creek. Tilted her head down so her hair would cover her face. _Please, whoever you are, please, please, go away._

The footsteps slowed. "Uh. Sorry. Didn't realize there was anyone here."

She pressed a hand to her eyes. "Don't worry about it."

"You want to talk about it?" She heard him unscrewing the lid of his canteen, pressing it into the slight current of the creek.

"Not really." She lowered her arm and wrapped it around her belly, felt the baby push up at her.

Nicholas took a long sip from his canteen, screwed the top back on. Looked at her with compassion. "You miss your husband."

It seemed safest just to nod. She didn't need to start talking about it. Maybe if she said nothing she wouldn't cry again. Maybe if she said nothing he would leave her alone.

"Mind if I sit?"

"I don't own the island." Her tears were drying now, salty and sticky across her face. Her face ached.

He sat on a rock a couple feet away from her, resting his elbows on his knees, keeping his gaze on the ground. "I was in love once."

She barely refrained from rolling her eyes. Hearing someone else's ruined love story wasn't going to make her feel any better. "What happened?"

"She got sick. Cancer." He shrugged. "Someone came to us, told us this place cures people. Would cure her if we came here and did our part. Sounded suspicious as hell, but we were desperate. I thought I would have done anything. So we signed up."

Juliet raised her eyes to his. "She didn't get better?"

"She did. But that thing -- the smoke... You know what I'm talking about?" Juliet nodded, although she was sure she didn't want to know what came next. "We were just taking a walk one day. Just taking a walk. Two years ago. And the smoke just -- grabbed her." His face twisted. "It's like the island cured her just to snatch her back again. I know there are two sides, but..."

"But it seemed unnecessarily cruel," she said softly, her voice imitating what she should have been feeling. She used to have compassion, she used to have concern, worry, feelings for other people, she had once been a fucking endless well of empathy, but now she just didn't know how to feel things for other people anymore. She just listened and waited. That's all she ever seemed to do here, actually. Listened and waited. Didn't ask questions, helped where she could, did what she was told and otherwise stayed the hell out of everyone's way. Easier that way. Easier to just not get involved.

"The next night -- late at night -- a man came to see me. Dressed all in black. He told me that if I worked for the other side, he'd bring Lily back to me."

She felt a little shiver run up her spine then. Raked her fingers through the leaves on the ground. Waited.

"I couldn't do it. I wanted to, so badly. But I couldn't help feeling it was just a trick. That she was already gone, and anything I'd get back wouldn't be... right. That she'd be possessed, or haunted. Cold. And I just knew.... I knew I couldn't. He touched my shoulder and he was cold as ice. But not a day goes by that I don't ask myself whether I made the right choice."

Juliet felt a stab of fear; her breath hitched momentarily. Was she ... not right? Did he know it somehow? Could he see it? Was this why she felt nothing for other people? What had the man in black done to her while she burned white with pain? And she could she talk to that pillar of black smoke, the pillar of smoke so like that which had streamed from the ruined freighter. Finally she said, "You did what you thought was best. That's all anyone can ever do."

He nodded, looking at the ground again. "So what about him?"

"James?"

He nodded again.

"You remember when I said I'm not much of a talker?"

He looked up, half-smiled at her. She felt her lips twist upward slightly. "I guess I'll leave you alone then," He stood.

"Nicholas?"

"Yeah?"

"Thanks."

She listened to him go, thought about what Nicholas had said about the man in black. Maybe it was true and he'd ruined her somehow. Or maybe she just been ruined no matter what. Without the man in black, she would have been dead, left to rot in the cold muddy grave of the Swan. Was what he'd done to her really so wrong? Would she have really preferred death? Instead of this child kicking her from within, the heaviness she felt in her body these days, the warmth of her skin under her palm? She didn't even have a picture of James, no way to believe she'd ever see his face again. Except for this being that was half-her, half-him, getting ready to _be_, and she'd been thinking about that more and more lately, whether she'd see pieces of him again in this new person.

And as much as she couldn't stand to think about it, she had the man in black to thank for that. He'd saved her. He'd saved her child. And the awful powerlessness of it came to her then. Nicholas had had a choice, on Lily's behalf. She never had that choice.

But Ben. Ben. The man in black had given Ben that choice, on her behalf. She hated Ben with every fiber of her being. But she'd lived because of him.

And then she thought again, of that day, that horrible fucking day, the day of changing her mind on the sub and then changing it all over again in the jungle. Making desperate, impossible, impetuous choices. Questioning her decisions over and over. Watching as Jack dropped the bomb down the rabbit-hole that would suck her into yet another new and strange life.

And wondering all the while whether she made the right choices at all.

------ FLASHBACK (1923) ------

She sat on the ground, her back against the wall of the station. Rolling the barrel of the gun. The single bullet remaining inside glinted at her as the air around her wavered pale white. She looked up, worried. That was the third time in the past ten minutes. The sun was nearly all the way up and she knew Alice was trying. But the wavering air wasn't a good sign; it was an incomplete flash.

His body rested on the ground about twenty feet away from her. She'd checked his neck for a pulse after, her fingers brushing the same skin she'd touched just minutes before, looking for his key. The key she was now wearing around her own neck -- not that it was doing a lot of good with an empty arsenal or the doors to the station in which Alice was now trying and failing to turn back the clock on the ruined battle.

Why had she done nothing? Nothing until all she could do was step out of the path of Alice and the gun and Nicholas. On that sub after Kate told them about the bomb, she'd knocked out the guy trying to give them their sedatives. Told James, "We can't just let those people die." When had she changed? She thought again of the man in black. Wondered, again, if he had destroyed some unknown piece of her.

She tilted the gun and dropped the bullet into her palm. Her fingers closed around it briefly before she slipped it back into the chamber. One bullet.

Jacob had told her she couldn't die. Not unless she did what she needed to do for him. Or unless she'd become so broken he was willing to give up. She would never try to kill herself -- there was Jonah to think of, above all else -- but she couldn't help but wonder. Would she know when her soul was broken enough? If she never did what he needed?

Juliet tried to ignore the nagging voice asking her if she'd made the right decision. Part of her wanted the mole to be Alice, she knew. Because then she wouldn't have been responsible at all for what had happened to the people in that battle. But Alice's reaction -- or overreaction, maybe -- had rattled her to the core. And she wasn't letting go of this gun for anything.

Finally the door to the station opened and Alice stepped out, pale, shaking, sweating. She shook her head. "No good."

Juliet stood and tucked the gun into the back waistband of her pants. "What do we do with him? We can't carry him." Their people always burned their dead to keep Jacob's brother from manipulating the bodies.

"I don't suppose you want to wait here, do you?"

She shook her head.

"Well, neither do I, quite frankly. I say we leave him here for now. Our other camp's closer. Let's get some help, get some guns, go from there."

Alice stepped down from the stairs and Juliet was again reminded how tiny Alice was. Juliet practically towered over her, but it never seemed to feel that way.

Juliet didn't move, narrowed her eyes. "What if someone else was in on it?"

"What?"

"Nicholas. What if he wasn't working alone? Why should we automatically trust the people at our other camp?"

"Because it's _our_ other camp, Jules. If we can't trust each other, who can we trust?"

"That's not an answer."

"Since when did you start asking so many questions? Jules, I'm exhausted, we just lost so many of our people. You ought to be glad I'm not questioning your own loyalties right now, but Nick's lying over there dead because he betrayed us, and your son is in a camp with very little protection right now. Can we just go already?"

Alice was already walking away. Juliet hesitated a moment before she followed.

* * *

She'd never been to the other camp before -- the camp consisting of nearly all time travelers. And these travelers weren't shy about their origins. She counted four nylon L.L. Bean tents, a pyramid of bags of Kingsford charcoal, and two plastic lanterns that -- had it been night -- would have proven they were battery-operated.

Alice approached a young couple; he had a goatee, she had a shimmer of hoop earrings through each ear, and both were wearing jeans and Geronimo Jackson T-shirts. "Sid, Fran, this is Juliet. Could you get everyone together? We need to have a meeting. It's serious."

She couldn't look at Alice. Couldn't bring herself to say a word. Too many doubts. About Alice, about Nicholas, about herself.

* * *

In the end, most of them hiked back to their village, bringing with them a good deal of weapons; they had more permanent structures there and anything they could do to not shock the non-travelers would probably help. That night she sat on the floor of her cabin, her body hunched and tense. Her eyes burned with exhaustion. She was tired, dirty, hungry, but couldn't seem to bring herself to deal with any of those things.

The murmuring of low voices came to her through the windows; Sid and several others were staying up all night in nervous anticipation of an attack. She'd heard the expression "sitting ducks" more than once that day, but it would have been more dangerous for them to try to leave. So they stayed.

A quiet knock on the door startled her. She glanced at the boys, sleeping in her bed, and moved up against the door. "Who is it?"

"It's Richard."

She opened the door, unable to meet his eyes as he stepped inside. She ran a hand over her face. "I don't know what to say. 'I'm sorry' doesn't seem to come close."

"May I sit?" Richard nodded at one of the two chairs at the far end of the cabin. She nodded. He sat; she stayed where she was. "I shouldn't have put you in that situation."

Of all the things she'd expected to fly from his mouth, that hadn't been one of them. "What?"

"You were far too close to him to be able to make any distinction. I thought your closeness would be an advantage, but I was wrong."

"I didn't want to believe you," she admitted.

"Do you now?"

"I don't know."

"Alice is worried about you."

"I don't care," she said, and she meant it. "How do you know it wasn't Alice?"

"How do I know it wasn't you?"

"How do you know it wasn't _me_? I'm not a keyholder. Richard, how do I know it wasn't _you?_"

"I don't care whether you believe me or not, Juliet. What can you do to me?" he pointed out. "Nothing. I'm working for Jacob just as I have been, just as I always will be. And you say you're not a keyholder, but what is that around your neck?"

She yanked the chain over her head and slapped the key into his hand. "That was Nick's. Take it," she snapped. "Now you have three of them."

He looped the chain over his head. "These will be redistributed," he said calmly.

"Why do you work for Jacob?" she asked in a low voice. "Are you just that fucking noble?"

Richard covered his surprise quickly. "I hope you're not thinking about going over to the other side. Especially after today."

She shook her head. "I just asked you a question."

"I'm working for him because he's the only one who can give me what I want most."

"Yeah? And what's that?"

"I should think you could figure out what it is. I'm tired of this, Juliet. All of this."

She stared at his calm face, his dark lashes. She thinks of the Richard who travels to Miami seventy-eight years from now, his gaze sympathetic in the lights of that projector in the Mittelos conference room. "You want to die," she whispered.

He nodded.


	44. I'm Not Lying

_"Can the world sustain such a contradiction? And this was even better, because as the illusion of prettiness and horribleness flipped back and forth, we flipped with it. We were uglier than her, then suddenly we were lucky not to be her, but then again, at this angle she was too lovely to bear. She was both, we were both, and the world continued to spin."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

------ FLASHBACK CONTINUED (1923) ------

She was alone in the kitchen area; her eyes had glazed over while she waited for water to heat. The boys were playing nearby. Chris had been asking this morning where his parents were, and she didn't know what to tell him.

Richard had asked her last night if she would consider raising Chris. She'd thought of James, what losing his parents had done to him. How he'd spent most of his adult life focused on revenge. And if she was the reason Chris' parents were dead, she didn't really feel she could she be a mother to him.

And she was scared at how alone she felt right now. And frankly, she kind of felt like beating someone up. Anyone.

But she'd told Richard she would think about it.

Now she watched as Alice crossed the clearing to speak to some of their people; their eyes caught for a moment. Alice was the first to look away, but a few minutes later she came and sat down next to Juliet "Any coffee?"

How many mornings had Juliet met Nicholas at this table? He was always an early riser and he'd smile at her and tweak the edges of Jonah's hair and pour her a much-needed cup. She shook her head, feeling sick.

"You mind if I make some?"

"No. The water's on for oatmeal."

Alice started messing with the percolator. "Are you all right?"

No way was she getting into any of this. Not now, not ever. "I'm fine, Alice. How are you?"

"Fine," Alice said lightly.

"So what are we supposed to do now?"

Alice scooped coffee grounds into the basket. "Everyone who's here from the other camp is staying until we can build our numbers back up. Got a good tip on a bunch of NRA members in the '80s. Also, I think we're going to pursue a few archers who didn't quite place into the 1952 Olympics."

Juliet stared at her. "You can't be serious."

"No, I'm quite serious. Those flaming arrows had to come from somewhere, no?"

"Thanks for that," she said sarcastically.

Alice dismissed her with the flutter of a hand. "Anyway, today I'm putting together a raid on Dharma for some ammunition."

"Alice. Don't."

"What? We have to."

She hesitated a long moment. "I remember that raid. Two of our people will be killed in it."

"Our people like yours and mine, or your Dharma people?"

"_Our_ people. Yours and mine."

Alice checked the water Juliet had put on a few minutes earlier. "Dammit, this is taking forever. So... was I one of them?"

Juliet narrowed her eyes. "Should I tell you if you were?"

"Was I?"

"No. All I know is it was two men. James shot one of them."

Alice hesitated. "It might be a sacrifice we have to make. And according to you, we already did."

That was enough. She was done holding her tongue. "Tell me, Alice. How many people exactly are you willing to 'sacrifice'? You're saying this is a sacrifice you'll be willing to make -- as long as it's not you."

"Don't overreact, Jules. It's just... a bit of insider trading. Do you want to come? See him?" Alice's overabundance of charm had always worked on Juliet, but now she was seeing something she hadn't allowed herself to before. There was cruelty in that charm.

"That's just too twisted." This whole thing was too twisted. "Besides, what if he saw me?"

"He didn't, though, did he?" Alice raised an eyebrow and there it was, that charm peeking out at her again. That manipulative sneaky charm that had pushed her into those half-dozen ambushes. So twenty-three people were dead because of Nicholas. Before that she'd killed eight on Alice's behalf. What the hell was the difference?

She stroked the fuzzy edges of her hair. They even had matching haircuts. "Alice?"

"Yes?"

Juliet stared at her, still figuring things out. Even when motives were supposed to be good, they were bad. Or maybe it was the other way around. "Go away."

Alice squinted, confused. She looked at Juliet for a long time, expecting her to be joking. Juliet didn't react. Finally Alice stood. "Fine. We've got to get this set up. Keep an eye on the water, will you?"

_It was mine in the first place,_ she thought.

* * *

The next morning was cool and fresh. She'd heard Alice's group return late the night before. She came out from her cabin with Jonah and Chris to find a cluster of their people waiting for her. She stopped walking, touched the shoulder of the boy nearest her, although she didn't quite notice who was who.

The sun glinted off the key now around Mark's neck. Mark: someone she'd never thought much about before this morning. Now he stepped forward in a somehow too-deliberate swagger and crossed his arms. "You know," he said, loudly enough for the crowd to hear, "Richard seems to want to let you stay here. But I'd say a lot of us have some serious concerns about that."

She felt her face slide automatically into its mask. It was James Ford snarling, "What's _she_ doin' here?" all over again, that day she'd arrived at the Oceanic camp. And that day she'd kept her silence. Now she fixed her eyes on Mark. His crowd might as well have been holding pitchforks and burning torches the way they glared at her, but she didn't really care.

"Go on," she said calmly.

"Well, let's see," someone else answered sarcastically. She couldn't even remember his name. Scott? Sean? Steve? What the hell was it with all those S-names on this island? Wait, Scott and Steve were from Oceanic. This was Sean. Felt like this island had a revolving door sometimes. "I don't suppose you're gonna tell us why you were f-- " Sean's eyes flickered over the boys -- "fraternizing with the enemy."

"If no one else knew, how was I supposed to? You think he told me everything?"

"So why are you lying?"

"I'm not lying," she said expressionlessly. "Anyway, Alice and I took him out."

"No, _Alice_ took him out," Sean snapped. "And a day too late."

"Where's Richard?" she asked.

"Richard's busy." Mark took another step forward.

Juliet stood her ground, but her eyes darted across the clearing. Alice was sitting by herself in the kitchen area, not looking up, and Juliet turned her attention back to the group in front of her. "Convenient, then, that you're all choosing the present moment to discuss this. You know, it's funny. How you've appointed yourself the camp's moral police." God, she would have given anything -- anything! -- to have a stack of files from Mikhail on these people.

"Yeah, well, we've taken a vote," Mark said coolly, "and it's pretty much unanimous. We don't trust you, and we want you out of here. Not later, not tomorrow, now."

She felt her lips twist involuntarily. "And what if I don't leave?"

He shrugged, tipping his head to the right. Her eyes traveled down to the gun at his hip. "Then we wipe that smirk right off your pretty little face."

------ END FLASHBACK ------

James is saying something to her, and she blinks. "Sorry, what?"

"I said, how the hell do we get this shit -- uh, stuff -- off his fingernails? Kid looks like the damn bassist for Driveshaft."

Thank God he's not making a big deal about Jonah knowing Latin. She knows she should have told him, but this was the first time Jonah had even used Latin since they'd been back, and it had shocked _her_, too. She'd assumed he was forgetting it. So she grins, jabs a finger at the ceiling. "Clementine's upstairs. She'll show you."

"Fine. Any chance of you gettin' that carburetor off the kitchen table tonight?"

"Ooh, someone's cranky tonight. First of all, that would obviously ruin my manicure. And anyway, that's not a carburetor. It's not even part of the fuel supply system. God, if you can't even tell what is or isn't a carburetor by now...."

He crosses his arms, his nostrils flaring. OK, so it's totally a carburetor. But he's not laughing. She bites her lip -- suddenly she gets the distinct impression James isn't in the mood to play along. That maybe he's angry with her after all, for her never-ending lies of omission. She tugs at Jonah's earlobe. "Hey buddy, I think it's time for you to go back to bed, OK?"

James lugs him upstairs without another word.

She means to get up and toss her auto parts back into the garage -- she'd had such high hopes for tonight before Clementine's makeovers began -- but her eyes travel down to the book open on the table. U.S. Air Force, 423rd Bomb Squadron, 1945. Nicholas was in the second row, third from the right. She stares down at his face for a long moment, then slams the book closed.

* * *

Juliet's in bed reading when James finally goes in. After he'd toted the boy up to bed, he'd read him a lot more stories than he technically deserved, seeing as it was his second bedtime of the evening. Then somehow he ended up playing a couple rounds of Mario Kart with Clem down in the basement while reporting to her on student-teacher night ("Well, you ain't gettin' expelled _yet_, sweetheart"). Jules had already checked Clem's homework so he shuffled the girl off to bed on time for once.

He'd puttered around the kitchen for longer than necessary, ignoring Juliet's stack of books but noting the counter was empty of her grease-monkey accoutrements. He kept waiting to calm down, but it wasn't happening. Finally he figures he'll just get it over with, and he slams the bedroom door behind him a little harder than he'd planned.

She looks up, startled and guilty. Closes her book -- One Hundred Years of Solitude -- and waits. Her guilty gaze, her obvious expectation of his anger, almost undoes him, but he needs to get this out. Now.

"You wanna tell me what else you're hidin' from me?" It comes out as a growl.

"James -- "

"Now I been real patient with ya, but somethin's gotta give. He speaks _Latin_?" He's leaning across the bed, half-looming over her, and she quickly, defensively, slides away from him, standing on the opposite side, her face suddenly unreadable. "He's six, for Christ's sake."

"Yes, James. He's six. And he's an _Other_," she snaps at him. "A Latin-speaking, time-traveling, jungle-hiking _Other_. This should be a surprise to you? Where the hell do you think we were?"

"You coulda told me he speaks Latin! Jesus Christ, that was a shock I didn't need."

"If it makes you feel any better -- although it probably won't -- I thought he'd forgotten it," she says, shooting daggers out of those now-vicious baby blues. "This was the first time he used it since the island."

"Well, ain't that convenient," he growls. "An' what'd he have to say?"

"James -- "

"No. G'head, tell me."

She folds her arms. Goddamn is she ever icy right now, it's like the temperature in here's just gone down a good thirty degrees. "He recognized a picture of the man I was with on the island. He wanted to ask me a question about him, but he said he didn't want to hurt your feelings."

"Yeah, an' what'd he ask?"

She hesitated. "It's not important."

"I don't give a crap what you think is or isn't important right now. Why do you keep lyin' to me?"

"I'm not lying."

"Not tellin's the same as lyin'." God, where is this all coming from all of a sudden? He was willing to let her keep as many secrets as she'd needed, secure in the awareness that she was opening up to him slowly. But this was his kid they were talking about.

She fixes her glare on him. "He told me that when he was very little, he'd thought this other man was his father. And he wanted to know what ever happened to him, because he couldn't remember."

"Yeah, an' what happened to him?" he challenges her.

"He died," she bites out. "He died because we thought he was a spy. And Alice and I were out in the jungle, and we killed him." That cool Other-ness in her eyes reminds him of being tasered in the jungle. Sure, it had become a favorite in-joke back in Dharma, and even these days they'd toss it around from time to time like a beloved old baseball. But now he's remembering it, truly remembering it, and it feels strange and sharp and foreign. A thorn embedded in the palm of his hand.

"Because you thought he was a spy," he says, trying to understand. "An' was he?"

Her face twists into something indistinguishable. "No."

It's so soft he can barely hear, but he grimaces at her implication, and she looks so ashamed he wishes he had never brought this on. He has to fight off the urge to come around to her side of the bed and just wrap his arms around her until they don't care anymore. She's staring off to the side, at the wall, at nothing, and he wants to kick himself for his goddamn pointless anger, but the truth is he's still pissed that he didn't know his own kid speaks Latin, of all fucking things.

"Jules," he tries. "I know you got your secrets and the stuff you don't like to talk about -- and about what you just told me, yeah, I get why you didn't wanna tell me. But if it's about our own goddamn kid -- you can't keep secrets about Jonah from me, OK? You just can't do it."

She raises her face to him in a sort of daze, and reaches out with her right hand to touch the wall. Belatedly, he realizes she's trying to steady herself, because a moment later she crumples to the floor.

* * *

The next thing she knows, James' face is hovering over her, anxious, desperate. She wonders why, exactly, he's shaking her, saying her name over and over, and she blinks and presses her hand to his shoulder.

"Jesus Christ you scared the shit outta me," he gasps.

She realizes she's on the floor next to her side of the bed and it all comes back to her. He helps her sit up, his gentleness a marked contradiction to the verbal assault he'd launched on her after slamming the door behind him a few minutes earlier. Not that she hadn't deserved it. She looks around the room. "I'm all right."

He leans back on his heels. "You sure? You want me to take you to the E.R. or somethin'?"

"James, I passed out. It was nothing. I just -- got a little panicky."

He winces. "I'm sorry for yellin' at you."

"It's OK. I deserved it."

He shakes his head. "No you didn't."

"Let's not have a fight about having a fight, all right? There's a lot of things I should have told you by now. Maybe after we see Faraday." That's not until next month, but it's something. It's a deadline of sorts. How was she supposed to tell him about Jonah in the future? His teacher had positively gushed to them about Jonah's aptitude in math and science, and James had grinned proudly and nudged her while she'd sat there half-frozen.

He touches her knee. "I'd rather have you here and conscious."

She feels the beginning of a small smile. "That's good to know."

He slides forward and gathers her into his arms. She clasps her hands around the back of his neck. _This is real,_ she tells herself, even if sometimes nothing else feels that way.

"Whaddya say we go to bed?"

"I'd say that's the best thing I've heard all day."

"Good. 'Cause I know you gotta be up early tomorrow to finish that car."

She rolls her eyes at him. "Wiseass."


	45. OK

_"Let me in, let me in, let me in."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

Today is so not the best day for this.

She has four voicemails from Rachel piled up on her phone, all frantic questions or complaints about Rachel and Brian's upcoming wedding -- which, Juliet wants to remind her, isn't until January, but that doesn't really matter since it's already October now, and Rachel's trying to plan the menu and pick colors and decide all those stupid awful things that Juliet had been through when she was engaged to Edmund. Anyway, half the time these days Juliet has to let Rachel's calls go straight to voicemail and just waits to call her back until she had a solid hour or two to spare.

Then there's the T-bird engine. After about a month of near-daily trips to the auto parts store, she'd started getting to know some of the other regulars, including a 60-something guy named Bill -- who'd just bought a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle. They'd started keeping in touch via e-mail when they didn't see each other at the store, and before she knew it, she was rebuilding the engine for him. He'd paid her a lot more than she'd asked for, and he'd also ended up referring her to a few of his vintage-car buddies. Now she has a stack of business cards James had printed up for her at Office Max, _Leah Tobin, freelance vintage auto repair_. "Y'ain't just a T-ball mom anymore," he'd teased her.

Regardless, the engine for that '77 Thunderbird isn't going to fix itself, but the whole thing is a lot more complicated than she'd expected, and aside from all the other problems with it, the electrical system is a mess. And she wants (needs) the whole disaster out of their garage by next weekend because she's scheduled to take on her next project by then.

And today is a Tuesday, which means she has to get Clementine after field hockey, and swing by Cassidy's to get Clementine's left-behind math notebook, and normally this would have still given her plenty of time on the car. But she'd spent half the morning trying to get Jonah's new passport sorted out since she hadn't gotten that fixed when they'd changed his last name to Ford, because she was all kinds of ridiculously busy then, too.

She's under the T-bird, her mind clouded with everything on her to-do list when her cell phone starts to ring. She slides out from under the car, pulls off her gloves. The number is unfamiliar. "Hello?"

"Hello, am I speaking to Leah Tobin?"

"Yes?"

"Hi, Ms. Tobin, this is Jackie down at Swandale Middle School. You're the stepmother of Clementine Phillips?"

"Uh, sort of -- " Not really?

"Well, you're the third person on the emergency contact form and we haven't been able to get in touch with her parents -- "

"Wait," she interrupts her. "Something happened? What's wrong?"

"Nothing serious, but she took a bit of a fall during gym just now and cut her knee. The nurse thinks she needs stitches. You think you could come down here and take her to the E.R.?"

She's already on her feet and hurrying into the house. "Tell Clem I'll be right there."

The drive to middle school takes a good ten minutes, and she'd had to run upstairs first to ditch her greasy garage clothes. She'd also grabbed Clementine's handheld Nintendo and arranged for a neighbor to get Jonah off the bus. By the time she rushes into the school 20 minutes later, she'd left messages for both James and Cassidy on their cell phones, and talked to someone at the reference desk who'd promised to track James down.

Clementine's sitting on the green vinyl futon in the nurse's office, holding a wad of bloody gauze up to her knee. Her face, red and blotchy, is streaked with tears, and when Juliet rushes into the office, Clementine bursts out crying all over again.

Juliet isn't sure whether to take it as a compliment (emotional honesty?) or an insult. Nevertheless, she wraps her arms around her, relieved to discover Clementine doesn't try to push her away. "Hey, hey, it's OK. We'll get you all straightened out," she assures her. "I'll take you in and we should hear from your mom and dad any minute now. Can I see?" Clementine nods shakily, her lower lip trembling, and pulls the gauze away slowly. "OK, yeah, we're gonna go to the hospital, you'll be just fine. By tonight you'll be telling everyone all about your war story."

Clementine sniffles and wipes her nose roughly with the back of her sleeve, obviously embarrassed to be crying. Poor kid.

Juliet catches her eye. "Don't worry about crying. Did you see _that_ thing? I'd be crying too." Clementine cracks a small grin.

After Juliet signs the nurse's forms, she helps Clementine hobble out of the school and pack her into the car. Juliet's just pulling the car out of the lot when her phone rings. "Hey."

Naturally, he's frantic. "She OK? You get her? Where are you? Lemme talk to her!"

"James. Calm down. She's all right, just a little shaken up right now. She needs stitches. Meet you at Good Samaritan?"

"Yeah. Can I talk to her?"

She hands the phone to Clementine, who tries to bravely put on a front despite the fact that she's hurting and overwhelmed. They hang up after a minute or two, and Clementine sniffles again.

"I ever tell you I've dislocated my shoulder five times?" Juliet asks.

Clementine's eyes widen. "No way."

"Way."

"How?"

Lies come too easily, as usual. "Used to be into martial arts. My suggestion? Don't get into martial arts."

Clementine giggles, just a tiny bit, before she's wracked with another shudder.

"There are some tissues in the glove box. Or on the floor, maybe." She really should keep the inside her car a bit neater. Clementine hunts around and finds a packet of tissues under the tangle of spark plugs she'd been resting her feet on. "Sorry."

Clementine blows her nose. "That's OK. Juliet?"

"Yeah?"

"Sometimes I miss my stepdad," she mumbles.

Juliet's taken aback for a moment. Cassidy's divorce hadn't really registered in her head much except for logistical issues. "You don't see him?"

She shakes her head, tears starting to fall again. Juliet remembers being this age, when things suddenly get unbelievably confusing and emotional, and wouldn't want to go through it for anything. And then it all bursts out from Clementine. "My -- my sisters? They get to go with him every other w-weekend 'cause he's their read dad. And he said I can come too 'cause he still thinks of me as just another one of his kids, but my mom won't let me 'cause she only has me half the time and she said she's not giving up any more weekends. But I miss him! It's not -- it's not fair -- that people can just go away -- and I knew him ever since I was two and -- how do I know you're not just gonna go away and this is all just..._ bullshit!_"

Despite the fact that they're on the way to the emergency room and it's probably not the best time to stop driving, Juliet pulls over, shifts the car into park, and hugs Clementine while she lets out a series of angry sobs.

------ FLASHBACK (1923) ------

They gave her five minutes to pack. She grabbed a satchel, threw in a change of clothes for both her and Jonah (they'd yanked Chris from her grasp before she'd even realized it), her pocketknife, a canteen, matches, a blanket, some food, a bowl, some first-aid supplies. She left the envelope of their photographs behind, thinking the pictures wouldn't survive the elements of the jungle any better than they themselves would. She picked up the bag and grasped Jonah's hand as they stepped outside.

Mark extended his hand, obviously intending to check her bag; she handed it to him wordlessly, and he dumped the contents out onto the ground. She bit her tongue as he sorted through everything, but glared when he held up her pocketknife.

"It's just a pocketknife," she bit out.

"So I'll just put it in my pocket, then," he said, and did so. His eyes traced her body, looking for hidden weapons, and he called to a woman nearby to frisk her. Juliet ground her teeth together at this latest humiliation.

When the search turned up nothing, he nodded and crossed his arms, satisfied.

"Feel all better now?" she cooed sarcastically.

* * *

The first night wasn't so bad. She built them a shelter and a fire not even a mile away from their camp, half-believing that Alice, Richard, _someone_ would come looking for them. She and Jonah peeled bananas. Scooped oatmeal with their fingers. She wrapped him up in the blanket and they slept with the stars peeking out at them through the makeshift roof, his head on her stomach. The air around them was eerily silent. It was sick and beautiful all at once.

The second night she heard the familiar sound of chains clanking in the distance. The smoke didn't come to her but she stayed awake all night anyway, jerking her head up whenever she felt in danger of nodding off. Keeping him safe was more important than sleep, than anything.

The third night she made up stories for him as they watched their campfire flicker and hiss against the sporadic drizzle.

The fourth night they were under a different bamboo shelter, having walked in a long and pointless arc for most of the day, but she forced herself awake repeatedly again, for no reason she could specify. Except somehow it felt like they were being watched.

The fifth night the skies opened up on them before she could get a new shelter together, and they were already two miles away from last night's. She cursed herself for not thinking of a tarp when she'd been packing. A tarp. As if they would have even let her take one. She and Jonah were tucked under the thick canopy of a banyan tree but they were damp nonetheless, and food was running scarce. Jonah was tired of walking, especially because most of the time it felt like they were walking to nowhere (and mostly, they were). He wanted stories but they had no fire to read by in this rain, and anyway they had no books (and anyway she couldn't remember how to make up stories that had happy endings).

The sixth night he cried for hours, tired and confused, upset about the scraped knee he'd gotten that day, and nothing she could do seemed to calm him down. It was another of those nights where she felt like they were being watched. He finally fell asleep in her arms, and she kept very still. Her right leg fell asleep, her eyes burned. Her old shoulder injury was giving her trouble again. But really she felt nothing.

The seventh night they didn't speak. Jonah ate the food she gave him and pulled the blanket over himself, curled away from her. She rubbed his back as a way of saying good night, then stayed up through the dawn again, picking at her nails.

Then, the eighth day.

Whispers, whispers rolling over them, surrounding them. She grabbed Jonah's hand and spun around.

A petite woman dressed in dark clothing stood completely still, her gaze calm and steady She was Asian -- Japanese, if Juliet really thought about it, and somehow, she knew. She just _knew._ "Hello, Lily."

Lily nodded. "Juliet." Her voice was soft and far away.

Juliet squeezed Jonah's hand a little tighter and tried to not think about how all the birds had silenced themselves in the presence of this visitor. She nodded at Lily.

"OK," she said.

------ END FLASHBACK ------

James storms into the E.R. -- he's talked to Cassidy; she's on her way too -- and storms up to the receptionist, demanding answers. The damn receptionist looks coldly down her nose at him and points to the waiting area. He looks over and sees Juliet and Clementine sitting on hard blue plastic chairs. Clementine's slouched, clattering away on her handheld, despite the redness in her face that signals recent tears. Juliet looks up at him and smiles, and he rushes over to both of them. "You OK there, Rambina?" Clementine nods bravely, points to the bloody gauze over her knee. "Yeah. Except they're making us wait for_ever_."

Juliet looks vaguely amused. "We've been here for thirty minutes tops."

He kisses the top of Clem's head and she blushes and squirms away, glancing around the waiting room as if she's going to see anyone she knows from school.

"I hate hospitals," he grumbles.

Juliet smirks at him. "Yeah, doctors are just the worst."

She moves over a seat so he can sit between them, and he slides an arm around her shoulders. "Thanks for takin' care of her," he whispers.

She touches the side of his face. "Hey, I got your back. Even in the 'burbs."

Cassidy arrives not long after, and goes with her when it's time for Clementine to be seen by the medical staff. He and Jules ditch the uncomfortable chairs when a slightly-less-uncomfortable couch opens up, and she tells him about Clem's outburst in the car.

"I think we should talk to Cassidy about our schedule," Jules is saying. "Shuffle things around so Clementine can get one weekend a month to see her stepdad. We give up a weekend, then the next month, Cassidy does."

He frowns. The last thing he wants to do is have less time with his daughter, and he tells her so.

"James, Clementine's known her stepdad since she was, what? Two? She's known him longer than you."

He feels his brow furrow. Dammit, does she always have to be so fucking calm and logical and big-hearted about everything? So he asks her that exact question.

She looks away, a little embarrassed. "Yeah, well, just don't put any firearms in my hands, OK?" Her phone buzzes with a text message and she rolls her eyes. "Hang on, Rachel is driving me insane with her freaking wedding plans. It's just a wedding, for God's sake!" She whips out her iPhone and starts to text message back.

"You ever think about it?"

"Firearms?"

"No."

"Rachel's wedding plans?"

"No." He crosses his arms. It's clear from her wide eyes that she realizes exactly what he's getting at. "You don't gotta be such a wiseass about it," he tells her, and then he's the surprised one. Surprised at how his voice is shaking.

Juliet puts her phone down and looks at him expressionlessly.

"I mean..." Goddammit, is she really making him say this? How the hell is he supposed to back out of this now. With a joke? No, she's just waiting for him to say something. God, is he really trying to sign up for a lifetime of these scary blue stares? "You know, gettin' married." There. He said it. _Fine._

She frowns. "You don't want to marry me."

"Yeah, then who the hell do I wanna marry?" he growls.

"You want to marry Juliet."

"An' who the hell are you, sweetheart?"

"Leah!" she exclaims, frustrated, throwing a hand into the air.

He scootches closer to her, grabs her knees. "I really don't give a shit what name you're usin' these days, grease monkey. Paper's just paper."

"Yeah, and what do you think a marriage license is made out of?" she asks, and her lips turn up just a little.

"Oh, see, now you're just fuckin' with me."

"So, what you're telling me is that you just proposed to me, with swear words, on an emergency room couch that smells disturbingly like stale Play-Doh."

"I was thinkin' stale chicken marsala from the hospital cafeteria, but sure." He's really starting to freak out now, and he fights the urge to storm off. If she doesn't want to marry him, she should really just have the goddamn decency to tell him.

But when he looks up at her, there are tears in her eyes. "OK," she says. "Yes."


	46. The Balance

_"It was a small thing, but it was a thing, and things have a way of either dying or growing, and it wasn't dying."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

------ FLASHBACK (1923) ------

She followed Lily at a distance, carrying Jonah on her hip. No one said anything; the birds were silent; the wind was still and stiff, a suffocating grip on their lungs. So this was the woman ripped away from Nicholas, and Lily walked like a whisper, barefoot, one foot directly in front of the other. She made no tracks, no noise.

Juliet knew she was being pushed into this, but she was out of choices and she didn't care. The sky was a dusky gray as they came into a clearing; she recognized one of her bamboo shelters from a previous night.

"Sleep here tonight," Lily said.

"What about... Jacob's brother?"

Lily shook her head. "Tomorrow." She paused. "Why'd you have to burn his body?"

There was no animosity in her question; this wasn't Harper confronting her during an otherwise routine therapy season. It wasn't even Harper stalking her in the jungle during a downpour. Lily just looked sad and far away. "I'm sorry," Juliet said. "It's just what we do."

Lily looked at her for a long moment, her own face still, her eyes dark with longing. Then she reached out a hand to touch Juliet's arm. Her hand -- the coldest cold. Juliet jerked her arm away, bringing a curled hand up near her chin, the reflex automatic.

But she knew. She knew she wasn't like Lily, and her knees almost buckled in gratitude. She wasn't like Lily. She was just plain old fucked up.

* * *

Late the next morning they arrived at the edge of a camp. Whispers rolled around them again like grasping arms, and Juliet turned, then turned again, and Lily was gone. "Where'd she go, Mama?" Jonah asked. "Where'd she go?" Juliet didn't answer, just looked to the edge of the camp, where a man dressed in back leaned against a gnarled old tree in the sun.

She ignored the burning glares of the others in the camp; her feet moved as if on their own accord. The man in black was smiling. A true, genuine grin. "Well, hey there, JuJu," he said amiably, using an old baby name of her father's. He remained seated.

Juliet stood in front of him, crossed her arms. "Just. Don't."

He clapped his hands together and let out a hearty syllable of a laugh. "Juliet Carlson Burke, what a pleasure it is to see you again. At least, it will be if you don't start swearing at me this time."

His eyes traveled down to Jonah and she stepped in front of her son protectively. "Don't look at him, don't touch him, don't speak to him."

"I don't think you're quite in a position to be making demands. Tell your little buddy if he's hungry, there's some food over there." He pointed to an open tent.

Jonah, always cautious around strangers, tugged at her hand warily.

"Why don't you wait a minute?" she said to him, and then turned her focus back to the man in front of her. "You know... it really pisses me off that I get headaches when you and your brother fight."

He shook his head regretfully. "Sorry. I'd beg your forgiveness, but I did save your life." He winked at Jonah, shyly peeking around her legs. "And his too, if my calculations are correct."

"Just stay away from him."

He waved his hand dismissively. "I assure you I have no desire to harm the boy. And anyway, if I'd known my brother was so wrapped up in your cause, too -- well, frankly, I would have just left you to rot."

"How kind of you."

He chuckled slightly and stretched his arms over his head, leaned back. "Why don't you take a seat?"

"I'd rather stand."

"Suit yourself. And anyway, you're not really working for him, are you? You're not working for him any more than you're working for me. You've always just been working for yourself."

She stared at him expressionlessly. "I'm just trying to survive." And she sat after all, pulling her son into her lap.

"Well, thanks to my brother, you're doing an excellent job of it." He let out a long sigh. "Do you have any idea how much I want to kill you?"

"Do you have any idea how much I want to kill _you_?" she replied.

He let out a loud, hearty bark of a laugh. "That's the spirit! You always did have a bite. Ben was right about that."

Her spine stiffened. Funny that she could feel so unafraid talking to this man, the coldest cold man, Jacob's brother -- but the mention of Ben and she's ready to attack. "Where _is_ Ben?" she asked icily.

"Oh, he's around here somewhere, I suppose. I told him to stay scarce while you're over on our side. You do hate him so." He smiled.

And a realization washed over her, although she couldn't identify the source. She tilted her head, watched him for a long time without saying anything. "You can't lie to me, can you?"

The smile faded from his face. He didn't say anything.

"You can't, can you?" she repeated.

He shifted and folded his arms. "My only choices are silence, or the truth. Everything I've told you is true."

She didn't want to believe him, but she did. "If I ask Jacob about you, would he confirm that?"

He looked irritated. "Yes."

"Tell me what the war is about."

Silence.

"Jacob wouldn't tell me either. Why?"

"Because you'll hate yourself. And you won't do what he wants. So instead he's based his whole desperate attempt on something that will likely fail him in the end, anyway." He smirked.

"And why don't you want to tell me?"

"Because you won't believe me, and it probably won't be worth it to tell you. The funny thing is, I _am_ the one trying to save this island, not my brother." He winked. "Everyone always seems to love him. What _is_ it about _blondes_?"

She gave him a steely glare.

He coughed uneasily and she forced down a laugh that threatened to bubble over unexpectedly. Was she really intimidating the fucking devil?

"Trust me, JuJu, I'd love for you to come to my side. You're one of the very final things I'd need, but I admit your death would help me much more. And that's not likely to happen unless my brother decides to give up on you."

"That's what he told me, too."

"It irritates the hell out of me, mind you."

She smirked. "Yeah, I can tell." They stayed silent for a long moment.

"_So_, JuJu."

"About the war."

"You won't believe me," he said cheerfully.

"Try me."

"It won't help you any. It'll only make things worse for you."

In the back of her mind, she heard Richard's words from two years earlier. _If people here knew what they were really working for, the balance could shift._

"Tell me anyway," she said.

------ END FLASHBACK ------

The cold side of the bed wakes him when he reaches out for her in his sleep. For a split-second he's engulfed in panic, like none of it ever happened. Heart thudding, he shoots his hand out for the lamp, and blinking in the brightness, his eyes adjust enough for him to see her purple shirt hanging over the back of the doorknob.

"Sonuvabitch," he mutters in relief.

Cat blinks at him.

He's still naked from earlier encounters, and he pulls on a T-shirt and a pair of flannel pajama pants, opens the door into the dark creaky hallway. But the entire house is dark and his uneasiness resurfaces. He checks the back deck (it's empty), checks the driveway and her car is still there. He kicks a couple of Matchbox cars the boy had left on the floor. It's three in the morning. _Where the fuck IS she? _-- and he hears a clatter in the garage. James opens the door from the kitchen and there she is, ducked under the hood of the T-bird, a tangle of spark plugs on the floor next to her. "Couldn't sleep?" he asks.

She jumps, nearly clunking her head on the underside of the hood. "Jesus, James, you scared me!"

"Yeah, well, then we're even."

She shakes her head, her lips set in a thin line. Wipes a greasy hand across her hip. "Sorry."

"Tried countin' sheep?"

Juliet lets out a frustrated sigh and turns around, starts yanking open the drawers of one of her metal cabinets. "I can't find my ignition firing indicator. Where the hell did it go? Seriously, I don't need this right now, I'm so behind on this stupid car and I -- and -- UGH! " She slams the drawers closed, one at a time. Slam, slam, slam, slam.

"Try kickin' it," he suggests.

She turns around, confused, her face contorted. "I really don't think that'll help me find -- "

"Yeah but I'm better at gettin' angry than you are."

She bites her lip and kicks the cabinet with the side of her work boot, yielding a metallic echo. She stands there shaking, her hands balled into fists.

"Feel better?"

"No."

"That's 'cause it was a pretty piss-poor attempt. Try it again. Hurt that motherfucker," he encourages, and he sees the hint of a smile creep onto her face before her expression hardens. She draws her entire leg back and wallops the damn thing with all her strength. The side of the cabinet buckles with a shuddering metallic whomp; it's heavy enough not to tip over, but it makes a gallant attempt, and its entire contents rattle -- the screws, the nuts and bolts and wrenches and plugs.

"SHIT!! OW! _Fuck!"_ She sits down abruptly and yanks off her boot, rubs at her sore toes.

James sits down next to her, takes her foot in his hand. "Better now?"

She considers this, her face still crumpled up. "I think so."

"You wanna tell me what's the matter?"

"It's stupid." She moves her leg out of his grasp, wraps her arms around her knees.

"Listen, sweetheart, we could go around in circles all night, but this concrete's cold as hell, so you might as well just get it over with." Is she mad she said yes? To what he'd asked her in the emergency room?

"I'm jealous," she admits. "Everyone on your plane who did something bad on that island -- it was all erased. Why did I get to erase everyone else's bad deeds, and all of mind stand?"

That's a good question, he has to admit. "If it makes you feel any better, it's only the stuff after the bomb that stands, right?"

"Well, yeah."

"So that means Danny Pickett could still be walkin' around on that island right this very second."

She cracks a wry grin. "That polar bear must still be there, too."

"But yeah. I mean -- to answer your question, no. It don't seem fair at all."

"Well, fair is something that doesn't really exist on the island. I wrecked plenty of other people's lives, too. The real problem is -- " She presses a hand to her mouth and squeezes her eyes closed, shaking her head.

He feels an inexplicable pang of fear. She doesn't really let herself go like this anymore. The first couple weeks she'd still been in a daze, her emotions unpredictable. But she's such a good liar, she'd probably be a better con artist than him at this point, and some days he's not always so sure what's the mask and what's real.

He hears her sharp intake of breath._ Here it comes_, he thinks, although he doesn't even know what it is that's on its way.

"There is no good or evil, James. There's only what we want." She blinks her eyes open, and they're warm and they're ice all at once.


	47. Famous Last Words

**This one goes out to makealist, for suggesting the flashback here -- sort of a fluffy smut situation, or maybe a smutty fluff situation, but I hope you like it. This also goes out to CarolynneRuth for leaving review #400. Thank you both!**

* * *

_"When she saw my messy desk, she said she was the same way, and there was no dust on the TV, and I was easy to love. People just need a little help because they are so used to not loving."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

She pushes a strand of sweaty hair out of her eyes and groans. "I can't believe we just did that."

"Hate to break it to you, sweetheart, but we've done 'that' a lot of times before." He tugs her closer, which isn't so easy considering the backseat is fairly narrow.

Juliet's not even exactly sure how they've ended up like this, although she was pretty certain she was to blame. One moment she'd been upset and confused and they were sitting on the floor of the cold garage, and the next she was leaning over on all fours, kissing him, and he was kissing her back, and half their clothes were off before he'd dashed over to lock the door.

At any rate, she was never going to be able to look the owner of the Thunderbird in the eye, ever. She shivers a little as their body temperatures start to come down again. "I thought I told you we were never having sex in the back of another car again."

"No, you said we were never havin' sex in the back of another _van_. You never said nothin' about cars."

"I swear to God, James, if you just got me pregnant again, I'm quitting automotive repair for good."

He barks a laugh. "Oh, come on. It ain't like there was another shortage at the D.I. pharmacy. 'Sides, this piece a junk's been drivin' you nuts for weeks." He pats the inside of the door affectionately. "Maybe you'll like the T-bird a little better from now on."

------ FLASHBACK (1977) ------

She slammed her stuff down on the counter at the motor pool a lot harder than she needed to. Thermos of coffee, lavender bandana and a beat-up old walkie -- because Horace was going nuts about this trip tomorrow and wasn't leaving any of the support divisions alone. And the number 7 van (lucky number 7, ha!) was still acting up, which meant that someone was stuck working late in the motor pool tonight. She hadn't exactly told James she'd volunteered for it, though. Tried to make it sound like she'd gotten the short end of that stick that night, and he'd shrugged and muttered something she couldn't hear before turning back to his book.

Just as well, considering things between them hadn't been going very well lately.

Or, maybe more accurately, they were going _too_ well -- or, they _had_ been. And she had _that_ to blame their current problem on. She was just so sick of having this same baby discussion over and over again. Usually James' neediness was reassuring; after feeling like second-best her entire life, she finally had someone who not only loved her, but needed her. _Wanted_ her. Except right now it was driving her crazy.

Juliet zipped up her jumpsuit the rest of the way and slid under the van. The light in here sucked and the sun was already going down, but at least she was left alone with her thoughts, or maybe she could tune them out while she fixed something mechanical, unemotional, unlike those conversations they had where everything just kept going around in circles... Ugh, there she went again. Everything had just been going so well. She'd never been so happy, never thought she would ever have anything like the two of them had together. Why'd they have to mess with what was already working?

Except because of all of this, it really _wasn't _working very well right now, was it? It wasn't that she didn't want a baby. She'd been so excited when she and Edmund had decided to start trying. She'd watched the pregnant research assistant growing a little more every week and would think about how maybe sometime soon, that would be her, too. Of course, that was before she found out exactly _who'd _gotten that research assistant pregnant, and then that little happily-ever-after dream was promptly over.

And as much as she wanted to believe in happily-ever-after again, there were times -- times like this in particular -- that it scared her more than she could verbalize.

She knew part of James' neediness was the longing to create some kind of family, a real family, the sort of thing he'd had, then lost, then tried to deny for most of his life. She knew now that he had a home, a life with her, he was almost desperate to put down more roots. But it wasn't fair that his issues were pushing them to move forward, while hers were only holding them back. That automatically made her the villain in this situation.

And he went around looking like a kicked puppy every time she expressed any sort of hesitation.

But two weeks ago was, hands-down, the worst. She had the damn Dharma pharmacy to blame for that. They'd actually_ run out _of birth control pills. She'd stared at the pharmacist in downright disbelief. "How is that even _possible?"_ she'd demanded, and he'd muttered something about the Hostiles stealing their latest supply drop, and the sub being late. So she'd taken the box of stupid Dharma condoms with her face flaming. (OK, so one night early in their time in Dharmaville, she and Miles and James had actually gotten so drunk they'd started blowing up those Dharma condoms like balloons and batting them all over the living room, but that was another story all together, right?)

And on her way home that afternoon, she knew -- she just_ knew_ -- that James was going to start going on and on about how this was A Big Significant Sign, and she didn't know what she was supposed to say to that. Because it sort of did eerily seem like a sign. But then the logical part of her brain piped in with, _Well, then is every woman in the D.I. who's normally on the pill ALSO supposed to take this as a sign!?_ and she'd tossed the stupid paper bag with the stupid box on the bathroom counter and went into the kitchen to fix dinner. Of course, she'd also decided to have a big glass of wine while she was cooking, which seemed only fair.

He'd come in and headed straight for the bathroom. She tensed slightly but heard the shower start up, and she relaxed a little, or maybe she had the wine to thank. By the time he'd come out of the bathroom, dinner was nearly done and she'd actually managed to forget the whole situation. "Hey, you," she said, smiling.

He rubbed a hand over the stubble on his chin. "So, you got a hot date tonight or somethin'?"

_Shit._ She actually blushed. "The D.I. is out of birth control pills," she said awkwardly, and crossed her arms.

"That so?" He actually crossed his arms, too, and they stood there staring at each other for a bit.

"Mm-hm," she finally said, if that could be considered saying anything.

"Ya know, that sorta seems like a sign, if you ask me."

She barely refrained from rolling her eyes. "I knew you would say it was a sign."

"Well, what would you call it?" he challenged her.

"I think I'd call it the Hostiles intercepting another one of our supply drops."

"Listen, if you don't wanna have a kid with me, why don't you just come out an' say it?" he growled suddenly. His words were angry but she knew underneath he was just scared, maybe as scared as she was.

She tried to keep her voice calm; it was the easiest way to get him to calm down, too. "It really doesn't bother you that it's 1977?" Having a baby in the _past_ just seemed so...

"I mean, the clothes ain't so hot, but..."

Great, so he was calmer and now she just felt irritated. "How are we supposed to have a serious conversation about this when you're making jokes?"

"So now _I'm_ the one who's avoidin' the issue?" he snapped.

"How are we supposed to have any sort of honest conversation about this when all you do is _pout?!"_ she'd actually yelled, and from there it was a free-for-all until he grabbed a six-pack and stormed out of the house. At which point she'd yanked open the door and yelled after him, "Yeah, _real_ mature, James! Go get drunk and whine to Miles!"

It probably hadn't helped matters that several neighbors were barbecuing outside, and _definitely_ within earshot

Ugh, what a disaster.

In the two weeks since then, they'd both spent an awful lot of time reading. She started spending more time with Amy, telling James that Amy needed help around the house. And James started inviting Miles and Jin over a lot more than usual. But even the guys picked up on the tension between them... which led Miles to stop cracking as many jokes as usual... which led to things getting even tenser. And just in the past few days, James seemed to be working longer hours than usual, and now Juliet had just straight-out volunteered for this long solo night job. In fact, the only things they _hadn't _done in the past two weeks were have any sort of discussion... or actually have any sex. Which for them was definitely a record of sorts, and it wasn't very fun.

Eventually she realized it was getting dark and she needed to put on another light. But when she rolled out from under the van, she rolled straight out into a pair of legs. Startled, she almost hit her head on the bumper. "Jesus, James, you scared me!"

"Hey, sorry." James kneeled down, reached for her hands to pull her up.

"Thanks," she said softly, tucking a stand of hair behind her ear. "What's up?"

He nodded to a paper grocery bag on the counter. "Didn't know if you'd brought dinner along."

She hadn't, and she smiled. Wow, it felt like it had been a long time since she'd last smiled at him. He grinned back at her, flashing his dimples. OK. Maybe they could just have a night where everything felt normal again.

Dinner wasn't anything fancy, but he'd cooked and that was nice in and of itself. They ate sitting along the back bumper of the van, which for some reason she couldn't quite remember, didn't have its seats in. "James?"

"Yeah?"

She touched his arm. "Thank you."

He smiled at her, put his arm around her. She leaned in to rest her head on his shoulder for a moment, then sighed. "I should probably get back to fixing this damn thing."

"Yeah, guess so."

She straightened up and leaned in to kiss him good-bye, forgetting they'd shared barely more than an angry peck over the past two weeks. His mouth tasted so good and she pressed in greedily, suddenly wanting more. He had both his hands twisted up in her hair and suddenly he was unzipping her jumpsuit, trying to get his hands under her T-shirt. Her moan of appreciation was cut off when she remembered exactly where they were.

"James..." she hissed. "We can't -- "

"I don't see anyone else here, do you?" He started nibbling on her neck, his hands sliding up to their destination and she felt her resolve start to crumble.

He pulled them both further into the van and slammed the back closed behind them, started fiddling with her bra straps.

"We..." She couldn't remember what she was trying to say.

"Shh," he whispered, pressing his lips to hers. With a devilish gleam in his eyes, he unhooked her bra and tossed it into the front seat.

"That's just not fair," she protested, and proceeded to pull off his shirt, scraping her teeth over his shoulder and tossing it into the front seat as well. It was only after she'd unbuckled his belt that she started to think maybe this wasn't the best idea, and wasn't their whole ongoing fight over having a baby....

She didn't care anymore, and her legs were wrapped tightly around his hips when they heard the sound of footsteps shuffling toward them, Horace calling, "Jules...?" The lights were still dim enough that maybe -- oh _God_, she hadn't even stopped moving under him yet, the van was still rocking and James pressed his hand into her hip to get her to stop. He buried his face into her shoulder to muffle his panting. She squeezed her eyes shut. _This is so not happening._

The footsteps stilled several feet away from the van and she silently pleaded with Horace's walkie to go off with some urgent situation -- some urgent situation that also wouldn't get James' walkie going, considering _that_ was right next to them in the Van of Inappropriate Workplace Sex. James' heart was beating fast next to hers and he glanced down at her, wincing.

But Horace's footsteps, as suddenly as they'd halted, started to retreat rapidly. Juliet dropped her head back in relief and James started to laugh silently, his shoulders shaking.

"Yeah, what's so funny, wiseass?" she whispered.

"I think he saw your bra." He pointed, and she twisted around to see that it was, in fact, draped over the steering wheel.

"Oh. My. God," she groaned.

"That's the spirit," he encouraged her, and bit her neck, and resumed exactly what they'd been doing before their visitor had shown up. It had been a _long_ time, and they were both being idiots about this, or maybe that was the point, and they didn't need to have a Big Important Conversation about it, maybe they could just go with it and it wouldn't be the craziest idea in the world or the worst thing they ever did, but even so...

"We should probably -- " she gasped.

"I know -- " he groaned.

But they didn't stop, she didn't want him to, and afterward he tugged her against his chest. She closed her eyes and draped an arm around him.

"We gonna talk about this?" he asked in a low voice.

"I think we just did." Her head was still tucked against his chest but she knew he felt her smile.

He kissed the top of her head. "Everything'll be OK," he told her.

She laughed a little. "Famous last words."

------ END FLASHBACK ------

James comes home from work the Monday after their little garage encounter to hear a series thunderous crashes and shrieks emanating from the basement. Juliet, impervious to the noise, leans against the counter writing in her notebook. The door to the dishwasher is open, the dishes half-emptied.

"You check the basement for poltergeists lately?"

She looks up, gives him a huge smile, closes her notebook. "I finished the T-bird today."

"Ah, thank Christ," he mutters, but he bridges the gap between them, wraps his arms around her waist. "Nice work, grease monkey. An' no metal cabinets were permanently harmed durin' the job."

"I'm not even going to be able to look the owner of that car in the eye," she bitches, but leans in to kiss him. He catches her lips between his, nibbling on her lower lip as she twines her fingers in his hair. _Mmm... _and he really gets to come home to this every day?

A particularly loud yell breaks the spell. _Oh, right._ "So you wanna tell me what in the hell is goin' on down there?"

She rolls her eyes, grinning, and finds a spray bottle of Mr. Clean from under the sink. "Well, Ryan's here, and I don't know, there's some sort of turf war involving Optimus Prime." With the trigger of the spray bottle looped around two fingers, she counts off on her other hand. "OK, let's see, Ryan's parents want him home at 6:45, Clem's at Emma's and she's having dinner there, her homework's done, Emma's mom will bring her back at 8, Cat puked in the upstairs bathroom and I picked up one of those apple tarts from Kutchner's."

"Well, hot damn, I'm gonna go take a nap and grab a Mai Tai. Is there anything you ain't taken care of?"

She arches an eyebrow and raises the plastic container in her hand. "Didn't I just say that Cat puked in the bathroom?" She hands him the bottle and a roll of paper towels.

"Real subtle, Jules." He looks at the bottle, the smiling bald man on the picture. "Fuckin' label still reminds me of you-know-who," he grumbles.

She pauses for a moment -- why the hell did he have to mention Locke? She'd left Mr. Clean a dozen voicemails throughout July and August, worried after her visit that he'd try to return to the island. Last month she'd tried calling again, only to discover his phone had been disconnected. But she shrugs off the trace of discomfort he's sure he's detected on her face, and instead she offers up the hint of a laugh. "Well, you're the one who bought it."

"Yeah, well, we're changin' brands."

"I probably wouldn't be opposed to that."

He goes up to clean cat puke, and later dinner's a noisy affair with two six-year-old boys. The kids aren't paying them one bit of attention, so he leans in to her. "You thought about settin' a date yet?" He just can't kick the anxiety over the whole damn thing, will just feel better once it's done. He doesn't care what name she's using, this is just something he _needs_, but of course her whole damn insecurity thing is coming back and he's getting a fearful vibe off her now and then.

She flickers her eyes from the boys back to him. "Didn't you just ask me about this yesterday?"

"Yeah, but I don't think you gave me an answer yesterday, did ya?"

"Can we talk about this later?"

"Why?" he grumbles.

She sits there staring at him for a long time, some sort of scheme running behind those baby blues. Finally she stands, goes into the living room without another word. Is he supposed to follow her? What the hell is she --

She comes back into the kitchen, slaps a stack of paperwork on the table in front of him. "Waiting period in Oregon's three days, James. Fill out your forms and we can go on Friday."

"Callin' my bluff."

She narrows her eyes. "So what if I am?"

"C'mon, you gotta give me a little more time than that."

"Oh, and you accused me of stringing _you_ along?"

"Look, I know you hate weddings, but let's take some time and make it a least a little bit nice. I ain't never done this before. Just gimme two weeks."

She smiles and sits down next to him. "Now why do I get the feeling I've heard that somewhere before?"


	48. Two Weeks

_"But believing is not an issue here, the time for faith and fantasy is over, it is really really happening."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

She's sprawled across the bed on her stomach when she finishes the last page of Atonement. She closes the book and stares at him. "This was a terrible, awful, depressing book. Why in hell did you make me read this?"

He crosses his arms, leans back in the desk chair. "Gettin' you back for The Kite Runner."

She pats the covers all around her, looking confused.

"What're you lookin' for?"

"Taser," she sighs, looking disappointed.

"You can keep lookin' a long time, you won't find it. Read Neverwhere next. You'll like that one. A guy finds this cute chick in a mystery world and they cheat death and have all kinds of adventures."

"Yeah. I might be OK with that one."

* * *

He can tell she's nearly asleep one night when he brushes his hand over her collarbone. Might as well take a chance. "You ever gonna tell me about that?" he whispers. The scar is faded now, nearly white, but it's there and they both know it.

She doesn't open her eyes. "You'll punch a wall and I don't feel like calling someone in to replace the sheetrock."

His stomach twists. "Ben?"

"It doesn't matter, it was an accident. Mostly. And I got him, after, anyway."

Got him after, or shot him after? He wants to ask what it is he heard, but it's the same difference anyway. She's falling asleep and he lets her.

* * *

She finds the dress in the back of a needlessly expensive store downtown. Clementine's been with her, and all afternoon she's been making her try on things she hates. But this dress, it's a dusky dark blue, three-quarter sleeves with a boatneck, maybe early-'60s-ish (and she tries not to think about joking about fixing vans to buy those Kennedy-era clothes with her grown-up son on the island, _don't think about that now, just don't_) and she tries on the dress, frowning at herself in the mirror because nothing's looked like this looks, and for a split-second she actually feels beautiful.

"You should get it," Clem tells her seriously.

She shakes her head but doesn't take her eyes from her reflection. "It's expensive."

"So? It's not like you're blowing a ton of cash on a limo and a band."

She hesitates. "This is stupid. No one's even going except me and your dad."

Clem gives her a murderous look, shaking her head, and something very _James_ peeks out in that expression for just a second. "Get the damn dress, Juliet."

She shuts up and buys the damn dress.

* * *

"So, uh, you gonna change your last name?" he asks one night out of the blue. They're loading the dishwasher and the TV is on in the living room, low. Some nights these days she just likes the noise.

She can tell it's not really out of the blue at all; he looks anxious. She pretends not to notice. "Might as well. It was a fake name to start with."

"You know, if you ever think you can go back to just bein' you..."

She puts a soapy hand on his arm. "James. I know. Just... don't."

* * *

She tells herself she would have been fine if she'd never held Allison's baby at that neighborhood block party over Labor Day weekend. Breathing in that sweet-baby swell just about did her in, and now she jokes about not wanting to get pregnant because it's absurd, it would be the worst idea in the entire world, she's still a quarter crazy at best some days. And it's not even all that likely she could even manage to get pregnant at her age anyway, and it's not like she's a fertility expert or anything.

And some days she clatters around the garage, slamming her stupid tools around because the island has managed to take everything from her at one time or another. James is the only man she's been with since college who's still alive, whose death she hasn't had a hand in, one way or another. And she lost him for those half-dozen years anyway. And it's taken time from her, the time to be with him or her sister, or the time she could have had to have another child.

And days pass and she knows she's going to lose her son to that island someday. And he will go and maybe he will come back and maybe he won't, but she doesn't know and some days on long runs she wishes she could run right back to the island and drag him home, even to the wrong year, just so she knows he'll be OK.

She just wants _something,_ just one thing that is hers and can't be taken away, not ever. That's really all it is, and it's her problem, not his, so she keeps it to herself.

So she thinks about having a baby, and never says a thing about it, makes jokes about not wanting one because it's just yet another way she can go about pretending that everything's fine, she's here and present and coming in strong.

(Wanting things on the island never worked out right, anyway.)

So she pretends like she doesn't care about all the things she missed having Jonah when and where she did, never picking out a high chair or taking a thousand baby pictures or seeing a ultrasound image or feeling James' hand on the warm taut skin of her belly. Like she doesn't care one bit she missed Rachel's pregnancy (_that was my own fault anyway_) or Julian's birth or getting to spend time with him measured in years, not days or weeks.

Like she doesn't miss being a doctor.

Like she doesn't miss her own name.

But the truth is, she does, she misses being a doctor. She doesn't miss racing against time and fighting blood pumping into all the wrong places and her own pathetic attempts as a surgeon on that island, the red cascading over her hands in one helpless fucking case after another. But she misses creating life, before she gave up and took so many others.

And some days she feels like she's just flying around in circles, a bird in a cage.

* * *

She tells him she doesn't want a fancy ring and he finally believes her, only because she crosses her arms, in the jewelry store, and calmly says, "Ed. Ed. Ed. Ed." And he gets it, he does. She just wants a plain white-gold band. She's still not comfortable with owning a lot of nice stuff, and diamonds never proved anything to her in a marriage anyway.

"You really want to spend money, we need another bathroom upstairs," she reminds him. "Clementine's about to hit the primping years."

* * *

The night before, they sit cross-legged on the wood of the deck and drink rum straight from the bottle.

* * *

She spends the morning in the garage and he's out in the yard with the leaf blower. She's got headphones in her ears, Talking Heads are on -- the iPhone is still stupid, but at least it's finally good for _something_ -- and when she finally slides out from under the car, she realizes the yard is silent.

She walks through the house, can't find him, and she checks the time, decides to start getting ready. When she comes out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, he's just standing there in the hall, grinning like an idiot.

She feels herself return the stupid grin. He's a mess, streaked with dirt, still in the same clothes he'd been doing yardwork in all morning.

"Is that your wedding flannel?" she asks him.

He takes his hand from behind his back and he's holding a yellow flower.

* * *

"You know, I don't think I've ever seen you in a suit before," she says, straightening his tie.

"Yeah, well, my damn Dharma jumpsuit must be in the wash."

"Huh. Mine, too."

* * *

Just before they enter the county clerk's office, he stops and grabs her hand. "Wait a sec," he says seriously.

She's purposely exuding that eerie calm that used to drive him crazy before he really knew her. "What is it?"

He shifts nervously from one foot to the other. "You still got my back?"

She has no idea what this is leading up to, but there's only one answer to that, anyway. "Absolutely."

"Good," he replies, flashing his dimples at her, nodding briskly. "Now let's go on in and lie to a judge, Leah."

She laughs, and they get married.

* * *

She's tugging at his arm early the next morning like it's Christmas. He burrows down into the covers, pretending he doesn't notice her or hear the alarm clock buzzing. "Goddamn, when did you turn into a morning person?" he growls.

She jabs a finger into his ribs. "Come on, we have to get up and go to the airport."

She drives -- "against my better judgment," he grumbles, because he hates the way she drives and never stops harping about it.

"Hey, who's the professional here?" she demands at one point.

"At fixin' them, not drivin' them. Unless you started moonlightin' as a racecar driver." He leans over to look at the speedometer and winces. "Hey, you wanna slow down there, leadfoot?"

She pushes him away. "You know, James," she says mock-seriously, "just because we're married now doesn't mean you can tell me what to do."

"Oh yeah, _now_ ya tell me."

She just grins, keeping her eyes on the road. Right now it feels like nothing ever went wrong, ever.

He smiles back at her. _God, does he ever look sappy right now,_ she thinks. _Probably as stupid as I do right now._

"This is gonna be better than a honeymoon, ain't it?" he says.

"Oh yeah. What terminal are they coming in, anyway?"

He checks the slip of paper. "Miles is terminal A, and then Jin's in a half-hour at C."

* * *

They're drunk, laughing loud enough to wake the boy, and James swings the kid over his shoulder and hauls him back to bed, reads him a couple of stories.

By the time he comes back into the living room, all three of them are conked out on the couch. Juliet's in the middle, her head lolling over onto Miles' shoulder, and on the other side she's clasping Jin's hand.

James keeps his laughter silent. _This is just peachy,_ he thinks. His second night of married life and she's already sleeping with other guys.

* * *

**So I'm going to be traveling the next several days, but I'm really hoping to finish this all up before the new season starts... although I probably won't make it in time. At any rate, I just wanted to warn you there may not be any updates for a week. I'll be back, though, I promise!**


	49. Perpetual Other

_"I was going to die and it was taking forever."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

------ FLASHBACK (1923-1924) ------

Some fucking war.

It took her a long time to stop shaking. Jacob's brother sat beside her, quietly, patiently.

Juliet shook, gulping for air, wordless, trying to remember Rachel's favorite flavor of ice cream, the first concert they'd ever gone to, the fight they'd had as children that end ended in a tumble down the stairs and her first experience with a dislocated shoulder. What had that fight been about? What band had they seen? What was Rachel's favorite flavor of ice cream, anyway? Or her own?

Anything to distract her from this horrible shaking, the sharp edges of the bark of the tree against her shoulder blades.

"Why don't you go get settled in?" he said quietly. "You're welcome to stay as long as you'd like. If you'd like to go, you're free to do so, but I think you'll find you're safer here."

She tried to even out her breathing; he nodded to a woman hovering nearby. "Could you please show them to their tent?"

The woman nodded sullenly. "Come on," she said to Juliet.

Juliet pushed Jonah up out of her lap, then couldn't quite remember how to stand. For a moment she was on all fours; it was climbing out of the sub on Day One. All over again. Then she was up, lifted Jonah onto her hip -- which probably wasn't a good idea considering her shaking, but she needed to cling to something, someone real, and he was all she had. Now and probably always.

Jonah reached for a strand of her hair anxiously as they walked. He hadn't done that since he was a baby, but he'd been through almost as much as she had, and it was probably worse for him, after all. She winced slightly as he wound it around his fingers a little too tightly, but it was the branches smacking her in the face all over again as she stormed toward the crater where the Barracks would be built. Everything hurt right now.

The woman nodded to a tent set up at the edge of the camp. "There," she said, and turned to leave.

"Thank you," she said awkwardly. "I'm Juliet."

The woman turned back around, looked at her for a long moment. It wasn't quite hate in her eyes, something closer to distrust. "I know who you are," she said, the short words thumping like small jabs in the ribs. The woman turned on her heel and walked back the way she'd come.

Juliet ducked into the tent, her bag over her left shoulder, Jonah on her right hip. There was a pile of blankets, not much else. She sank to her knees in exhaustion, put Jonah down. Shrugged the strap of the bag off her shoulder.

_Here we go again._

* * *

The first few months were the worst, before she'd figured out how to stop hurting over it all, Nicholas dead in a pointless heap, Alice sitting there silently as Mark and Sean played Alpha Male, Richard never coming after her or trying to do anything. He'd done nothing at all.

Some nights after Jonah was asleep, some nights -- the darkest ones -- she'd allow herself the luxury of crying (something she hadn't given into in years, really), her teeth clamped together to keep from making a sound, the tears running sticky down the sides of her face, pooling in her ears, her hair. She stopped eating for awhile, but it didn't help anything.

A few of the camp's inhabitants seemed quietly respectful of her, but they kept their distance, and anyway, the majority treated her like something they'd found on the bottom of their shoes. So many days she wished for a copy of Carrie, _why will I always feel like an Other no matter where I go?_ They were good to Jonah, though, and she wanted to go to the water and talk to Jacob, but she didn't trust anyone to watch her son for her, no matter how many rhymes or stories they told him. And anyway, the only person she really talked to now was her son, which left her strangely soothed and lonely at the same time.

Sometimes Lily and the others like her would appear at the edges of the camp, which seemed to make everyone equally uneasy. Most of the time they stayed away. She didn't see Ben, although sometimes she heard others mention him. Funny how her mere presence had led to his near-exile. That was as far as Jacob's brother had actually gone in trying to help her out, though. He didn't live in the camp consisting of his followers, and he rarely visited.

Meanwhile, once she started eating again, she decided the food was both better and worse than her last "home." (Maybe the last place she'd ever even come close to calling home.)

These people didn't like to manipulate time if they could help it; they mainly got around that fact by manipulating the dead, instead. Of course, the dead didn't go out to steal Dharma drops, so there went any chance for cereal or peanut butter or anything in a white-and-black container. There was a huge flock of chickens, though... which was nice until a few days in when someone handed her a machete, nodded in the direction of the coop and told her to go get dinner. She'd made Jonah promise to keep his eyes closed, stick his fingers in his ears, and they didn't talk about it other than that.

Her hair got longer. They had perpetual sunburns, dirt under their nails. Jonah's feet grew; someone found a new-old pair of shoes for him. He turned four. She read out loud to him anything she could find. Someone had given him an old beat-up copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and she read it to him with a dry mouth, changing Alice's name to something else she could never remember day to day, the words smooth and strange like a stone on her tongue.

And anyway, it wasn't _Alice_ who'd fallen down a rabbit hole and ended up in this crazy world.

But by now, five months in, six months, seven months, it was all a horrid routine. Miami? What was that? Some made-up place she must have dreamed. There was only this. She'd never felt so close to giving up, but what was giving up, anyway? Nothing. And at this rate she'd never even fucking die, maybe she'd just watch her son grow old and she'd catch right up with Dharmaville and Oceanic 815 and who knew what else.

* * *

One June day they clomped over once more to the chicken coop; she tossed the blade over the fence, climbed over after it; Jonah automatically sat, cross-legged, on the outside. She dropped the burlap sack to the ground, picked up the knife. "Hey, buddy, remember, close your eyes and cover up your ears, K?" she asked him.

He nodded, followed her instructions. She grabbed the poor sucker nearest her, pressed it down fluttering against the tree stump they always used, pushed back the shiver of pity she felt for the creature. She drew the blade up, slammed it down; it was over in a second. But when she lifted her head, she saw a mirror image of her own eyes, huge, scared, devastated. He had watched her, his mouth shaped into an O, and he jumped to his feet, staring at her, his brows furrowed. She reached down, shoved the chicken into the sack as quickly as she could. He still wasn't saying anything.

_What are we even fucking doing here? _she asked herself.

"Hey," she said gently. "That's just what we do here, to eat. But I know it's really scary, and I'm sorry you had to see that."

Jonah was trembling slightly on the other side of the fence, _What is it always with fences here?_, and she stepped toward him. He stumbled backward, gulping air.

"OK," she said unevenly, holding up her hands before she noticed the blood that had run into her fingernails, and shoved her hands back behind her back. She stayed still, drew in a ragged breath. They stood silently for a long time, watching each other to see who would make the next move.

When she thought about it later, she couldn't remember who'd stepped forward first.

* * *

"Lina, right?" Juliet asked cautiously.

Lina nodded, kept on stirring the pot of boiling laundry.

Juliet tilted her head. "Could I ask you a question? Please?"

"What?"

"The person -- or people -- who brought all those guns here a few months ago. Who was that? Do you know?"

Lina paused. "I wasn't here then. All's I know is, it was one of them keyholders from your old camp. A woman."

_A keyholder. A woman._

Juliet squeezed back the tears. If she started crying now she'd never be able to stop. Breathing seemed optional. Breathing didn't matter. _A keyholder. A woman._ She was going to ask Lina to please watch Jonah, and then she was going to beg someone to give her a rifle, and then she was going to find Alice._ A keyholder. A woman._

Sides didn't matter in this war. Not anymore. Not like they should have. But if Juliet didn't like the answers Alice gave her, she was going to fucking kill her.

Couldn't be simpler.

------ END FLASHBACK ------

She finds his hand in the dark, squeezes it experimentally to see if he's still awake. He squeezes back and she snuggles in closer, shifting a little restlessly.

"Can't sleep?" he mumbles.

"You're awake too," she whispers.

"Yeah, 'cause someone's squeezing the hell out of my hand."

"What are you so tired for, anyway? Miles ran himself ragged with Jonah today. All the rest of us had to do was kick back and watch." Those two had bonded almost instantly. Jonah was obviously enthralled by Miles' constant quips and smart mouth, which Miles had -- thankfully -- managed to keep relatively G-rated for the past two days. Miles was great with Jonah, tossing him over his shoulder fireman-style just like James does. And she'd thought all day about that hybrid her/James/Faraday/Miles trailing after her like a six-foot-one duckling in the jungle, and another piece of her son's future had fallen into place, just like that.

"I don't think we were all that lazy today," he muttered. "At least not us menfolk." True enough. He and Jin and Miles had taken Jonah to the skate park, stuck the kid on a board with a helmet and who knows what they were doing but she was glad she didn't have to watch and wince. She knew it was probably a whole lot of "Watch this, Dad!" and James probably stood there half the time beaming like an idiot and the rest of the time fretting over any little spill. It had to have been worse for James though than it would have been for her. She wasn't particularly a worrier, at least not about the little everyday things; James was the strict, anxious parent. (And who would have ever foreseen that outcome? -- she almost laughed thinking about it even now.) Maybe part of it came from the reassurance she felt having seen her son alive and well and in one piece, at least up into his thirties. "Never mind. I'm sorry. Go back to sleep."

"No, what's goin' on?" He yawned, stroked the skin on the back of her hand.

She wonders if she should even be digging into this now, or ever, but this is something they have in common. Some days it seems the things that went deepest between them were the things they never, ever talked about. And usually it was probably better that way. "Remember what we were talking about in the garage a couple weeks ago? How I said I was jealous of everyone on your plane for having their bad deeds on the island erased?"

"Yeah."

She hesitates a long moment. "I feel like I was being insensitive to you. I've just been thinking about it and -- I mean... the things you did before. You still went to Australia."

"Yeah," he said shortly.

"And you still..." _...killed an innocent man._

"Yeah." Quieter now.

Her heart sank. "I'm so sorry."

"Don't be. What's done is done."

"Did it help you any? On the island, when you found the original Sawyer?"

"Nope."

She sighs. "Revenge never really seems to work out, does it? Even if you tell yourself you have good reasons, tell yourself they deserve it..." She presses a hand over her eyes.

"You sound like you know what you're talkin' about."

"Yeah."

"You know what I think, blondie? People take advantage because you just always wanna do the right thing. And time and time again you've just gotten fucked over. So maybe -- for once -- you just should've done all the wrong things. Seen how that worked for awhile."

She can tell he means it to mostly be a joke -- it wasn't like she was so good to the people of Oceanic 815 back when she was still living inside that sonic fence -- but she feels the expression on her face hardening slowly, millimeter by millimeter. She's thinking it's a good thing it's so dark in the bedroom; he can't see her face.

But her voice, when she finds it, is icier than she'd intended. "And what makes you think I haven't?"


	50. This Was a Mistake

_"Have you ever wanted something very badly and then gotten it? Then you know that winning is many things, but it is never the thing you thought it would be."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

------ FLASHBACK (1925) ------

"OK, it's sort of like this," her grown-up Jonah said, stretching out by the fire. "Imagine time as a line..."

"No, a street," she tried.

"Ugh, not Dan's 'you can go back and forth on the street but you can't build a new street' bullshit."

Juliet glanced over at her little Jonah. "Hey, don't curse in front of..."

Her grown-up Jonah snorted. "Don't even start, or my brain's gonna explode."

"You're a time-traveling physicist. Just deal with it."

"OK, then pipe down and listen. Imagine time's like a line you're drawing. But something came along and knocked into the pencil, and that line turned into a scribble."

_Something_ came along? Yeah. Her, a bomb and a shiny black rock.

He picked up a stick, drew in the sandy dirt as he talked. "The longer you scribble, the tighter the knots get, right?"

"Speaking of knots, did I ever tell you I'm really glad you got your father's hair?"

"Will you please listen to me?" he said, irritated.

She rolled her eyes. "I'm sorry. I'm just..."

"I know," he said gently. "OK, so when you start to scribble, the line starts curling in on itself, but you can still basically understand the direction of the line, right?"

"Right."

"Well, when you keep scribbling, eventually it gets so cluttered you can't tell the beginning or the end anymore. It's all just a big tangle."

"Right. So what you were saying about everything converging..."

He nodded. "Basically, the line is starting to turn into a scribble. Time is starting to converge in on itself here. It's what's helping us to bring people here. How people are fighting across all times. The scribble -- so to speak -- is helping us manipulate time a lot more easily than we should be able to. But if things go on for too long..."

"Then what?"

"Then causality goes straight to hell. Let me ask you something. You ever had something happen you couldn't explain?"

"No, only constantly for the past twelve years."

He rolled his eyes. "Glad I didn't get your smart mouth."

"Like hell you didn't," she scoffed.

He looked like he was about to say something he wasn't supposed to, and she gave him a warning look, felt a pang of fear. She didn't want to know anything. She couldn't. She knew she wouldn't get a fairytale ending but that didn't mean she wanted confirmation of that fact.

"All right, mother dear, answer the question. Have you ever had something happen where cause and effect seemed muddled?"

"Yes," she said quietly.

"And it wasn't a regular time flash."

"No. It was like -- I was being pulled. I didn't know what it was."

He nodded. "That's been happening more and more around here lately, to different people. And if it doesn't stop..."

"Then what?"

"Then everything here -- time -- collapses in on itself, we think. Like a black hole."

"So how do we stop it?"

He sighed. "That's the problem. We don't know yet."

------ FLASHBACK (1924-1923) ------

She's been patient. She'd been malleable. She'd waited. She'd done what she was told. Just like when she was held a virtual prisoner in Ben's happy little yellow houses. And just like the day she looked at Ben's X-rays and felt tears building up, unwanted... she was ready to snap.

So Alice had betrayed her, taken years of friendship and trust. Those people she'd killed for Alice? What had she killed them for? Who? What had she stepped away from Nicholas for?  
She was fucking done. And Alice would be the last person she ever killed, if she can help it.

She didn't believe in Jacob's side anymore. But she wasn't any more with his brother than she had to be, either. She wanted her son to survive. And she didn't want to live forever. That was all.

So maybe she'd get a tasty little sliver of revenge. She'd been pushed too far, and she fucking deserved this. And if it was the wrong thing to do? Well, then she'd still be in the same place she lived now. And even if she didn't know (couldn't remember?) what Jacob wanted her to do -- she knew what Jacob wanted, and she couldn't have that.

And if she couldn't do what Jacob wanted, she'd just be stuck here forever. Unless she got so broken that Jacob was willing to let her go.

It was all circular, but it felt like a win-win in the sickest of ways.

She was tearing through the jungle, the rifle slung over her shoulder, when she heard someone coming. She hunkered down behind a bush, had the rifle in place within seconds. Mark was walking along the narrow trail. Mark, who'd put all this into motion in the first place, exiled her, made her hated by the people she'd lived with for four years, made her hated even where she lived now -- and he'd been the person who'd shoved her out into the wilderness with a three-year-old because it couldn't have been perfect, charming, amazing Alice. It was quiet, shy Nicholas and cool, distant Juliet, and Juliet had no key but that hadn't even fucking mattered to Mark, had it?

Speaking of revenge.... Her rage boiled over. She had the rifle. Who cared, anyway? Her own son thought she was a monster after today.

She aimed for his heart and pulled the trigger.

Mark fell to the ground with a satisfying thump, probably never knew what hit him.

A sharp exhale tore its way through her lungs. She got to her feet and approached his body, looked down at his wide-open, unblinking eyes. The trees swished overhead, casting a glimmer of sunlight onto the key around his neck. Oh. The key. She couldn't just leave the key out here for anyone to find. Her hands were steady as she removed the key from his neck and placed it around her own, tucked it underneath her shirt. Well, maybe that could come in handy sometime.

Now what? If she kept going toward Alice's camp, would she make it before anyone knew something had happened to Mark? Probably safer to keep going, get it all over with. She set back on the path, but she'd forgotten by now what a long trip it was. She stopped overnight to make camp. It was the first night she'd been totally alone since before she'd had Jonah... well, other than Flaming Arrows, Take Two. Was he all right back there with Lina? Did she make a colossal mistake? And she wondered about Nicholas. Had he just been totally innocent in this all?

Sometime in the middle of the night she was awakened by a strange sensation, it felt like she was being pulled, almost, backwards, in her lungs, behind her eyes, odd and indescribable. For several seconds she couldn't even see, but then she shook her head and thought it must have just been a dream, went back to sleep for a few more hours.

When she woke again, she decided this was pointless. She'd been gone all night. If Mark was due back by now... what? They'd know it was someone from her new camp. What if they tried to attack her new camp for something she'd done? They'd cast her out, too. Better to go back, warn them, protect her son. What a waste this whole thing was. Why had she let her anger overcome her?

She traced her path back; when she arrived where she'd shot Mark, his body was gone. So they'd already found him, they already knew. Or else Jacob's brother had found the body. Either way didn't seem good. She picked up her pace, was back just before sundown.

A guard at the edge of the camp raised his rifle when he saw her approach. "Wait," she said, holding up her hands. "It's me. Juliet."

He didn't lower his rifle. "What do you want?"

"I was just coming home."

"Coming home," he said suspiciously.

"Yes, I live here. What, you don't recognize me?"

"No, I know who you are, it's just -- you don't live here."

"I've lived here for months. Lina is watching my son."

"That so?"

"Yes, go get her if you don't believe me."

"And who the hell is Lina?" He kept his rifle raised.

She rarely panicked, except when it came to Jonah. What the fuck were they playing at? This couldn't be happening. This was why she hadn't left Jonah for seven months, hadn't trusted these people any more than they'd trusted her. She shifted nervously, and the jagged edge of the key moved against the skin under her shirt. "Is this going to take an outright bribe?" she asked coolly. She fished the key out, twirled it between her fingers. "I know where you can get some guns. A lot of guns. Pistols, rifles. Lots of ammo, too. You just have to let me back in after."

He raised his eyebrows.

They went in a small group, three men, another woman and her. She recognized them as the few in the camp who generally seemed to respect her, even though they, too, kept their distance. She felt relieved, though, that these were the people going with her. Could she trust them? What if once they got into the arsenal, they locked her in there? Or used her for target practice? Whatever. A deal was a deal, at least on her end, and if it was going to get her back into their camp, get her back to her son... then the ends justified the means.

The walk was long, silent and tense. She was uneasy, waiting for them to be ambushed by Alice or anyone else, but nothing happened. The next day, one of the men scouted ahead toward the arsenal and flashed a mirror from a distance to signal an all-clear.

It was surprising, in a way, that they'd lost one of their keyholders -- one of their keys -- and they didn't have guards at these doors. She wasn't convinced there wasn't a trap lying in wait for them, but the others had their weapons drawn and ready. Juliet walked up to the double doors of the arsenal, took the key from her neck. The last time she was here -- seven months ago -- Nicholas had still been alive, Alice was her best friend, and things hadn't yet splintered into a million pieces, not yet. Not again, anyway. She slid the key into the lock and pulled open one of the doors, breathing a sigh of relief to see the arsenal once again well-stocked.

"Come on," she muttered, and together they cleaned it out.

The rest of them went on ahead. She walked more slowly, carrying four rifles, a satchel of bullets looped around her shoulder, trying to figure out exactly what she'd just done. The key was tucked into her pocket now; she didn't think she should even be wearing it.

Her head was buzzing, and she was so lost in thought she nearly walked straight into a figure emerging from the trees. A tall, broad man, brown hair, hazel eyes. She sucked in her breath. "Nicholas?"

He grinned at her. "Jules, what the hell are you doing out here? Think she's got you carrying enough junk?"

"Wh-what?" she stammered. "Who?"

He looked confused. "Alice?"

"Wh -- " she couldn't seem to draw in a breath. "What's the date?"

"The date?"

"I'm not from your present, Nick -- what's today's date?"

"Oh, sorry. November 17, 1923."

How had this happened? There was no time flash. And she thought she actually saw stars behind her eyelids when she closed them. _It was me. It was me all along. NO. No no no no. I let him be killed and I could have just killed Alice for nothing._

"When are you from?" he was asking her.

"Next June," she managed.

"Oh, yeah. I see it now -- your hair's longer." He nodded at her weaponry. "And I take it we're still at this crazy thing next June."

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak for the moment.

He was watching her, concerned. "You all right?"

"Do you think you could get me back to my time?"

"You're not traveling alone, are you?"

"I am, actually. I'm -- I'm not sure what happened."

"I hope we haven't changed the rules by next summer," he said, frowning. "Traveling alone is never a good idea."

"It's just gotten a little complicated," she whispered.

He regarded her seriously for a long moment. "All right."

She decided to risk it. "What are you doing out here, anyway? I remember you'd been disappearing a lot around this time."

"You don't want to know."

"What? Why not?" Was he in on this after all? Could he tell that she was, now? Was she even going to get out of this at all? Maybe she was broken enough for Jacob to quit on her. Would that be the worst thing? Not any worse than she was.

Anguish passed over his face. "A couple of weeks ago, out in the jungle, I thought I saw Lily. Just for a second, and then she was gone. I know it sounds crazy, and I'm... I'm so sorry, Juliet. I just needed to know."

She didn't know what she was doing except dropping everything she carried and stepping forward. "It's OK," she whispered. "It's OK." She wrapped her arms around him, as tightly as she could, and he was hugging her back. He smelled just the same, felt just the same, and she'd missed him, she really had. It wasn't even that she'd missed having someone, anyone, it was that she missed _him_, and the thought almost buckled her knees. And he was already dead and burned in her present, would be dead and burned by sunset here tomorrow. If she told him, tried to warn him -- what? He'd kill her, likely. He'd have to. For what she'd just done. Her longing was replaced by cold fear. She had to get out of here. Now. As much as she did want to die, sometimes, she couldn't let that happen. Not like this. Not if it meant leaving Jonah behind with those people.

Footsteps approached, and she nearly jumped away from Nicholas. Mark folded his arms, nodded at them. "Hello," he said.

"Hey," they replied, almost in unison.

"Juliet's traveling -- you think you could help me get her back to next June?" Nicholas asked him.

Mark narrowed his eyes. "You're traveling alone."

"Things got a little complicated," she said smoothly.

"All right," he said. "We better get moving."

The sky opened up on them as they walked, slowing them, and then they stopped to eat when it got dark. Nicholas patted his pockets. "Hey, could I borrow your pocketknife, Jules?"

Her heart fluttered. "I don't have it anymore."

Nicholas looked disappointed. "What happened to it?"

"I must have dropped it awhile ago. Tell the me in your present to keep better track of it, OK?" She tried to fake a smile, couldn't. Mark narrowed his eyes. Of course. All this was how he'd found out about her.

It was nearly morning by the time they reached the station; she could see a faint pinkness in the sky -- but not as pink as the last time she'd lived through this early morning. But she realized her other self was going to show up with Alice any minute. That was why Nicholas had been there in the first place.

She turned slightly and recognized one of the men who'd raided the arsenal with her hiding in a bush nearby. He raised a finger to his lips, signaling her to stay silent. It must have been him with the dynamite. Nicholas planted a kiss on her forehead. "See you later."

She closed her eyes as she felt his lips against her skin.

Nicholas and Mark went down into the station. "What the hell are you doing?" she hissed to the man in the bushes.

"You're from the future. I suspected as much. You must have joined up with us by next summer, is that it?"

She nodded.

"So I'm just making sure you can get back to where you need to be. Thanks for all your help today."

"This was a mistake," she choked out.

"Like hell it was."

She heard Nicholas emerging from the station, and the other man ducked back into the bushes.

The white whine started up around her head. She looked at Nicholas while shielding her eyes from the growing glare. A second before she knew she'd be gone, she looked into his eyes. "I'm so sorry," she said, and then she was gone, or he was.


	51. The Absence of Something

_"Her winnings were the absence of something, and this quality hung around her."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

------ FLASHBACK (1924) ------

The white flash clanged one last time inside her head and then her vision cleared. She blinked, dragged her wrist under her nose; the bleeding was heavier than usual, but she had to get moving. It was a long walk back, nearly two days, and she tried hard not to think about anything. _A keyholder. A woman._ Yes. Herself.

And what about Alice? She could have killed Alice, for nothing. She'd _wanted_ to kill Alice, even. For maybe an assurance that she herself could actually die someday? That didn't seem soothing anymore. Maybe it was just that she'd never felt so alone in her life, even living among so many other people.

As far as she could see it, there were really two parts to the day with the keys. They'd seemed to go hand-in-hand, whoever had leaked the information about the battle with whomever had raided the arsenal. The latter had to be a keyholder, which had incriminated Nicholas (or Alice), or so it had seemed. But the first part -- that could have been almost anyone. And why had no one thought of the loophole of a time-traveling keyholder? Even one who'd taken a key by force? In retrospect, that just seemed idiotic. She wondered if Alice knew, had known the day she'd sat silently while Mark ran his mouth, sending Juliet packing. Her thoughts kept spinning around and around.

By the time she reached the perimeter of her camp, though, more practical matters intervened. She realized she had given Nicholas the wrong date for her return, and she had to hide in the jungle for two more days before her earlier self even left the camp in the first place. She was living in spiral of confusion, _maybe I should warn myself,_ but she didn't know if that was even possible. What happened if you tried to disrupt 'whatever happened, happened'? Even if that didn't always hold anymore, she told herself what was done was done -- and it could end up even worse if she tried to change things. That's what she told herself, anyway.

The good news was that, although she herself had been gone a week, Jonah was only without her for about an hour.

This really was a strange life she was living.

One night two weeks later, she was sitting very still in a corner of her tent, watching Jonah sleep because it was all she felt like doing. But she snapped to attention when she heard rustling outside her tent, and just like that, Richard Alpert was ducking inside.

"What the hell are you doing here?" she hissed, scrambling backwards on her heels and hands. "How'd you even get in here?"

"I don't have to worry about your guards," he said calmly. "Just after you left our camp, Mark told me I should come find you here the following June." He grimaced slightly. "Of course, if he'd understood how that would have worked out for him, I assume he'd have offered different advice. Where's the key?"

She'd already forced her face to go expressionless. "Threw it into the ocean."

"Is that so?"

"Yes."

"I know what you did, Juliet."

"I assumed so."

"And?"

"What choice did I have? You people exiled me here in the first place."

"I suppose we did," he said. She wasn't sure whether it was regret or nonchalance that colored his tone. They really weren't that different from each other at all, her and Richard. They both did what needed to be done, right or wrong. They both wanted to leave this terrible island one way or another.

Except this island wasn't terrible at all. It was the people that made the island terrible.

Or it was the island that made its people terrible.

"What are your plans now, Juliet?" Richard asked.

She ran a hand over her face. "Oh, _gee_, I don't know. I thought maybe I'd take up quilting."

"I wondered if you'd considered coming back to us."

She paused. She didn't want Jacob to win. But she didn't want to stay in the man in black's camp anymore; most of these these people hated her and it was unbearable, it was broken glass under her skin. "You would let me do that?"

"Under certain conditions."

"What, are you going to ground me?"

Richard flashed her a warning look. "You will stay within the confines of the village. You are not to speak with Jacob. You are certainly not to speak with his brother. You are not to live alone. You are not to carry a weapon. If you do, it must be with at least three others who are also armed. If I tell you to do something, you do it. If Alice tells you to do something, you do it."

"Fine," she said calmly. "When do we leave?"

------ END FLASHBACK ------

James is silent for a long time after she finishes talking, her voice soft and aloof and guilty in this dark room. He can't quite see her face but he reaches out to stroke her cheek and finds her face tense, her eyes squeezed shut. What's he even supposed to say, anyway?

"Goddamn," he finally mutters.

"Yeah," she chokes out. "Exactly." She exhales sharply. "I'm not a good person, James."

His stomach twists, not just because she's saying it, but because he can see _why_ she'd say it. Although he hates himself for even thinking that. "Don't go sayin' that."

She lets out a jagged syllable of a laugh. "Then what am I supposed to say? You know, that's why I couldn't handle it when I first got back. Rachel looked at me with so much pity. You did, too. I just... no one should feel sorry for me. Whatever I got, I deserved it."

"Juliet. Juliet, look at me."

"It's pitch black in here."

"Don't care, look at me anyway."

She shifts slightly, angles her head. He starts by kissing her forehead, then her eyelids, but she flinches, and the tears start to come, salty on his lips. He's a little scared but more relieved; he's only seen her cry _once_, the entire time she's been back. A shuddering sob rolls through her and he hugs her tight until she pushes him away, draws her knees up to her chest and wraps her arms around them. "I'm sorry," she chokes out.

"Hey, you don't want pity, I don't need apologies." Shit, he wants her to cry, it shows she's still human, not as strong as she always tries to seem. But he brushes his hand across her forehead and she jerks away, gasping, starts crying harder, like she can't get in enough air to breathe and cry at the same time. He just sits beside her like an idiot, not talking, not trying to touch her again, while she cries. After awhile it dies down, and without a word, she slides out of bed and leaves the room. He hears her flick the light on in the bathroom and he flops onto his back again, grinding his teeth together in frustration. Why can't she just let him in? Except, maybe that was exactly what she'd just done -- telling him about that bastard Mark (he doesn't care she killed him, he's fucking glad about it), telling him what really happened with the arsenal. That was all a big step for her, it had to be.

She comes back into the bedroom and sits down next to him, on his side of the bed. He starts to shift, sit up, but she presses a finger across his lips. "James." That's all she says, and then she settles herself on top of him.

* * *

James and Juliet had both been worried a little worried that it would be difficult finding things to do with Jin, Miles and Jonah that entertained them all, but Jin had two little girls at home, after all, and Miles... Well, Miles was simultaneously a grown man and a whiny little kid, so that helped immensely.

Most of the first day of Dharma Reunion '13 was spent simply catching up, and James loved seeing that huge smile on Juliet's face when Jin showed her pictures of Sang and Kyung. Jin had never even had the chance to meet Ji Yeon, but James knew how over-the-moon the guy was for the daughters he did have.

Sun hadn't come on this trip because she'd never quite recovered from the guilt she'd felt about leaving Ji Yeon to go back to the island, even though the end result would have been the same, regardless. And it was just too difficult traveling with two little kids.

Juliet was asking Jin all sorts of questions about his girls, and eventually she had even jumped up to call Sun, which had to have been weird for her -- and it was, Juliet assured him later; _hello_, she'd been the one who'd outed Sun's affair to Jin, and gotten a slap across the face in return. But as far as he could tell, the upshot of the conversation was that Juliet would e-mail pictures of Jonah to Sun, and maybe they could all visit them in Korea next year. Not bad.

Only problem was, Miles was acting weird around Juliet. She'd given him a huge hug at the airport, which he'd seemed happy to return at first, but the second she touched him he'd practically recoiled. Then, right after James had found them all conked out on the couch that night, Miles had jerked awake yelling incoherently.

Juliet and Jin had snapped awake too, and Juliet reached out a hand to Miles. "Miles! Miles, calm down, it was just a dream. Are you all right?"

He'd practically recoiled from her then, too, and it didn't go unnoticed. "Uh, yeah, yeah, no, I'm fine," he muttered. "Just perfect." Juliet's eyes had flickered from Miles to James, confused and scared. But they hadn't talked about it.

Miles definitely went out of his way to keep from touching Juliet the rest of the weekend. Even when she'd tried to hand him a drink, he was careful to touch only the glass, not her fingers. Eventually Juliet had just started avoiding him all together, encouraging "the guys" to go out and do things without her.

Now it's the last night before Miles was due to leave. Jin had already left that morning, eager to return to Sun and his daughters, but not before hugging Juliet tightly and promising to visit again soon. James paces the bedroom that night like a caged tiger; Juliet's in bed reading Neverwhere. Finally she looks up in annoyance. "James, are you going to come to bed, or are you going to keep wearing a groove in the floor?"

He crosses his arms. How can she just sit there all calm like this wasn't driving them both crazy? "We gonna talk about this?"

She looks resigned. "Miles?"

"What the hell is his deal? He's actin' like, I don't know --"

"Yes, you do," she says quietly. She closes her book over her hand, keeping a finger between pages to mark her place.

"No, I really don't. I mean..." He could barely bring himself to say the next part. "I mean, you ain't dead." It sounded more like a question than it should have, for some reason.

She knows what he means, though. "No, I'm not. I've interacted with the manipulated dead and it's -- I'm not that."

The manipulated dead? "Jesus Christ, blondie, sometimes the things that come outta your mouth --"

Juliet just shrugs, her expression wry. "See, and this is why I still haven't found a good shrink." She smirks, and he gives her a half-grin for that.

He sits down at the foot of the bed, plays with her toes. "What do you think he sees when he touches you?"

Juliet holds onto the book tightly for a long moment, her knuckles nearly white, then puts it on the end table. She's thinking hard, her eyes off in the distance. "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt," she says eventually.

Slaughter-House Five. The periods of time when the main character was dead. Buzzing and a violet light. "...What?" he whispers.

She meets his gaze. "I don't know. That's the only thing that comes into my head when I try to think about it. I just -- I can't remember."

"You... can't remember?" What else has he heard her say that about?

She just shakes her head. He doesn't know if she's making the connection, or has already made it -- or not, but he has to say something. "Juliet. You know... You know how you said you can't remember what Jacob wanted you to do?"

She tilts her head, her expression unreadable.

"What if they're related?"

Her eyes widen; she presses her fingers to her mouth and looks away, her eyes too bright. She slides out of bed and finds her blue notebook, the one that she filled up before starting on the yellow one. She shuffles through the pages, looks up. "You used to have a name, too," she reads aloud.

"Huh?"

"I don't know. I wrote that down one day. It just kept echoing around in my head, so I wrote it down."

"I think we gotta talk to Miles."

She presses two fingertips into her thumb, thinking. "I don't think I want to know. I'm here, it's over, whatever it is, it's done. I can't do anything for Jacob from here, and I don't think I would even want to."

"You sure?"

She raises her chin, looks right into his eyes, the hint of a sad smile on her face. "No. I'm not at all sure."


	52. Close to Belief

_"I began to wonder if this was really the rest of my life or just a continuation of the old one. I had so little to go on."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

**Tuesday, November 26, 2013**

"You know," James muses, settling against the seat, "I really hate flyin'."

"I'd say I can imagine why, but seriously, James, it's not like you were ever in a plane crash or anything," Juliet says innocently.

Jonah twists away from the window. "Who was in a plane crash?"

James gives Juliet a Look. "No one, shortstack."

Once they're in the air, Juliet glances over at him, squeeze his hand. "You OK?"

"Just perfect," he grumbles.

She grins at him sheepishly. "Oh come on, we're flying halfway around the world to see your favorite twitchy scientist, you can't tell me you're not even a little bit excited."

"Yeah. Right. Don't know which I'm lookin' forward to more, that or stoppin' off to see your sister and her mighty mouth of death."

"I actually think you two will get along," she tells him, smirking at his skeptical look. "You're really a lot alike. Actually, maybe a little too much alike. Maybe that's the problem."

"Yeah, as long as she doesn't kick me in the shins for stealing you away from her."

"It's Thanksgiving. That means there's no shin-kicking allowed."

Their plan is to stop in Miami for Thanksgiving, leaving Jonah in Rachel's care, and then for James and Juliet to head out to Oxford to see Faraday, squeeze in a couple days in London for a mini-vacation, and then swoop back into Miami and fetch Jonah before he missed too much school. She'd worried for a bit about his missing several days, but James had reminded her he was in first grade when he should only have been in kindergarten anyway, and he'd figure it out all right. "Since when were you the lax parent?" she'd teased him, but the truth was, neither of them were comfortable leaving Jonah with anyone other than Rachel. And for some reason Juliet was adamantly opposed to bringing him to see Faraday.

"So what do you wanna do while we're in Miami?" he's asking her. She's already been back twice, once with Jonah in August and another time on her own once school had started. She'd been really anxious about leaving then, but it ended up being a good thing; that had been when Jonah had started calling him Dad, which was probably one of the best goddamn moments of his entire life.

"Well, remember Rachel and I have tickets for La Traviata tomorrow night, so you guys are gonna be on your own. Stay on your toes with Brian, though. Full con mode, OK?"

"Yep. Better this than having Clem and Rachel in the same room, right?"

Juliet nods. They'd decided to time all future visits in both directions to limit the amount of time those two would spend with each other. All they needed was Clementine to mention some memory she had with James during the time he was supposed to have been on the island.

"Would it be too weird if... Um, I'd kind of like to visit my parents' graves. Rachel has never wanted to go with me since I've been back, and I didn't really want to go alone. I know it's kind of morbid, but it's just been so long."

"Uh, yeah, we can do that. It ain't that morbid."

"Have you ever... I mean..." She shrugs. "Yours?"

"No," he says shortly, and she lets him leave it at that. Yet another reason he loves this woman.

------ FLASHBACK (1991) ------

The linoleum was squeaky against her sandals; she tried to walk more quietly. The orderly at the front desk nodded at her. "Hey there, Julie, he's out on the deck."

"Thanks," she said softly. She found him wheeled up against the railing, looking out at the ocean. She nervously pulled at the wrist of her FSU sweatshirt, which should have been too hot for this weather, but the breeze cooled everything down in the latest part of the afternoon, especially on the beach. She chewed on her lips as she approached. "Hey, Daddy."

He twisted around and grinned at her. "Hey, JuJu. Didn't expect to see you today."

She pecked him on the check, sat on the bench next to him. "How you doing?"

"Oh, just fine. You should see the other guy."

It had been the other driver who'd run the red light, and he'd been killed. Even so, she couldn't help a tiny laugh, covering her mouth. "You're awful."

"Yeah, well, you gotta make your own fun around here. How's your mom doing?"

Juliet bit her lip and shrugged. "She had her third chemo this morning."

"What? Why didn't you say something yesterday? And what in the hell are you doing here now?"

"It's OK. Rachel's with her." Rachel could handle vomit a lot better than Juliet could; how the hell was she ever supposed to become a doctor? What a stupid idea.

"What do they have her on?"

"Um... methotrexate and cytoxan, I think."

"You think?"

"Yeah, I think. Reading the labels wasn't my first priority at the time."

He nodded. "Christ, me and her really threw you girls for a loop this year, huh?"

"Yeah, well, just make sure that next year's uneventful, OK?"

"I'll do my best. How's Eric?"

"Oh, um..." She blinked back sudden tears, rolling her eyes, turning her head away.

He sighed. "I'm sorry, JuJu."

"No, it's OK, he just..." _Decided he liked someone else better._ She shrugged, trying (and probably failing miserably) to look like she didn't care that much. It probably didn't help matters that Eric's new girlfriend lived on the same floor as she did. Stupid dorm walls were as thin as paper, too.

"Forget him, then."

She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "Yeah."

They watched the ocean for awhile, silently. He cleared his throat. "How's studying for the MCATs going?"

God, every question he asked today seemed to hit a nerve. Why couldn't he ask what she was reading or comment on last night's miserable Miami Heat game or something? "Well, you know... I mean, between you and Mom, I just..." She hesitated. "It's just been really busy."

"Then you stop coming here all the time. Or bring your books with you. I'll help you. How in hell are you gonna get into Hopkins if -- "

"Dad, I've been thinking. I just... It's just not such a good idea. I mean, I can just stay at FSU for med. Baltimore's just too far away right now." No way was she leaving either one of them now. Or Rachel. How was Rachel supposed to handle both of them, without her? Or what if Mom _died?_

He clapped his big hand over hers. "JuJu, you think I'm planning on staying in this damn chair the rest of my life? _No._ And even if that's how it ends up, you think I'm planning on wasting my life? _Hell_ no. And I'm not going to see one of my girls throw her life away taking care of sick relatives. You gotta go and live your life."

She felt her face crumple. Ugh, when was she ever going to learn how to hide her emotions? She started pushing the tears away, ashamed. "I'm sorry -- " she choked out. "This is just so stupid. Here you are, and I'm the one bawling like a maniac."

"Kiddo, it's OK. You're going through a lot right now."

"I just -- I don't think I can go into oncology after all. I'm sorry. I thought I could, I thought I wanted to help people, be like you -- but seeing what Mom's going through, and she's only just started...."

"It'd be easier when it's not your own family."

She shook her head, her stomach twisting. "I just don't think I can watch anyone else go through that. How have you managed all these years?"

"It just felt awfully good giving people good news when I could."

"I guess that makes sense." She swiped at the last of her tears.

He reached out, tugged at her earlobe. "So go into something where you can give people more good news than bad. Go be an OB or something."

She shrugged. "Maybe. I don't know. So, you think I can break you out of here for awhile?"

"As long as you're the one driving." He squeezed her hand again as she stood. "Just remember, JuJu, you're something special."

She nodded, wishing desperately she could believe him.

------ END FLASHBACK ------

James finds the sisters crammed into an oversized arm chair, limbs half-draped over each other, giggling at a yearbook. Juliet's head jerks up and she tries to slam the book closed. Rachel darts a hand over the page to keep Juliet from closing it all the way.

James hovers over the back of the chair, trying to look menacing. "OK, lemme see."

"No!" Juliet giggles, and tries to grab the book away from Rachel, who swings it out to the opposite side and up to James. Juliet makes a valiant attempt -- her arms are longer than Rachel's -- but Rachel slams her leg over Juliet's lap, keeping her from standing up, and James makes a quick grab. He's got the book up over both their heads before Juliet can snatch it back.

He flips it open it to the page they'd been looking at and begins to laugh. "Ah, jeez. Nice hair, blondie."

Juliet is bright red. "It was really, really humid that day, OK?"

Rachel cracks up and Juliet gives her a death glare. "Traitor," Juliet mutters.

Rachel smiles triumphantly, holds her hand over her hand to slap James a high-five.

"I'd be sleeping with one eye open tonight, if I were either one of you," Juliet says, and leans way over to the left and jabs Rachel in the ribs with her big toe. Rachel shrieks with laughter and starts swatting her away with her own feet.

"Jesus Christ," he marvels, "you guys are like five-year-olds."

"Nah," says Rachel. "We're at least six or seven."

* * *

"Rach, James and I are going to go see Mom and Dad today," Juliet says over breakfast. Their poor dad. He'd been a paraplegic for nearly three years before he developed an infection from his cath; hadn't felt any pain, of course, and no one knew until it had developed into sepsis.

Rachel screws up her face. "Seriously?"

Juliet nods.

"It just seems so... morbid."

She shrugs. "I know. I mean, I know what you mean. But... I don't know. I almost lost you, you almost lost me, who knows, you know? I just feel like going."

"I had a whole bunch of photos copied for you, by the way."

Juliet grins. "You did?"

"Yeah. I can't believe that stupid storage company. Those units were supposed to be watertight."

"It doesn't matter. I was gone for so long; hardly any of that would be of any use any more."

"I guess. Anyway, remind me to give you the pictures before you leave. Uh... By the way, Ed's buried in the same cemetery as Dad."

"What? Ugh." Juliet wrinkles her nose. "Please tell me they're not near each other."

"Nope, other side. Just thought I'd give you a heads-up."

"Well, thanks. I guess." Why did it feel sometimes like everyone she'd known before 2004 was dead? Rachel was real, though. She was here, thank God. Fuck cancer. Fuck paraplegia. Losing their parents had been bad enough, but when Rachel had been diagnosed with cancer, both of them felt like they were losing their last foothold on reality. And even though she wished she could have, Juliet had never allowed herself to believe in miracle cures.

But as much as she'd hated to admit it even to herself... the day after the crash of Oceanic 815, Juliet had squinted at John Locke (out of his wheelchair, running,_ running!_) on the fuzzy black-and-white screen of one of Mikhail's monitors -- and she'd felt something close to belief.


	53. Old Haunts

_"I whispered, 'Shut your eyes,' and I shut my eyes and pretended it was night and that the world was all around me, sleeping."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

------ FLASHBACK (1924) ------

Juliet was irrationally nervous about leaving, even though Jacob's brother had told her she was free to do so at any time. She slowly packed their few possessions into her satchel, while Richard sat on her floor, his arms crossed impatiently. How was it possible the man never had a speck of dirt on him? She hadn't ironed anything in five years.

At any rate, she made him wait until near dawn before she finally woke Jonah. They circled the long way around to bypass the sleepy-looking guard on duty, and that was that. She was out of this side and back to Jacob's. As if that really made her feel any better. "If it's all the same to you, couldn't I at least go live in our travelers' camp?"

"Our?" Richard's expression didn't change, although there was an edge to his voice.

"Yes. Our."

"Unfortunately, there are no vacancies in that camp."

"Of course there aren't."

"You know, Juliet, you're more than welcome to go back to where you came from."

She attempted a sarcastic smile. "Perfect. Put us on the next boat to Miami."

"I'm serious. If you'd like to stay on Jacob's brother's side, by all means, you're free to turn around right now."

Juliet shifted her bag to the opposite shoulder. "And you're absolutely sure you still want to recruit me in 2001? I really am an awful lot of trouble."

"Yes, I've noticed."

She stopped walking. "You know I've never asked you for anything. Not one thing. But don't -- don't think I don't understand what I did. If I'd known, I never would have done that. It was all just... circular. And I'm sorry, Richard. I'm so sorry. Just let us go live in the travelers' camp. Please."

Richard considered this, his expression serious but unreadable, and her heart skipped a beat, hoping. She didn't know how she could face Alice, any of those people again. At least if they could start over -- start over on Jacob's side again, with new people....

"I'm not making you any promises," he told her. "We'll see what they say, but I need someone watching you. Whatever trust I had in you, Juliet, it's gone now. But I did go and recruit you in 2001, so I must change my mind about you again."

Unless whatever happened, happened wasn't working right anymore... Right? Had she really always been here? How did that all work?

The travelers' camp was closer, the walk less draining. Juliet felt a little more grounded just seeing the trappings of modernity, a bunch of hippies and the L.L. Bean outdoorsy crowd and then those scientists, wearing clothing styles she'd never seen before. Richard ducked into a green and yellow Patagonia tent, and Juliet and Jonah sat down at a picnic table, the kind that would be in a suburban park. Or in the center courtyard in Dharmaville. How in the hell did they manage to get all this stuff here? There were a few more permanent structures here now, too. Some long, low buildings that could have been mimicking the Dharma rec room for all she knew.

The scent of tobacco wafted through the air, and she noticed the young couple from the '70s she'd gotten to know briefly before her exile to Jacob's brother's side. They were perched at the edge of the camp, smoking cigarettes near the treeline. How delightfully normal. They were just sitting there, enjoying the mild weather, chatting. Then the guy poked his girlfriend in the arm, and she giggled at him. Juliet looked down at the table.

Finally Richard emerged from the tent. "You can stay," he told her shortly. "They'll show you where to go when they're ready for you. Like I said, you're not to live alone, so they're going to pair you up with someone. I would advise you not to try anything underhanded."

She sighed. No use trying to convince him she wasn't planning on it. "Thank you." Her gratitude was genuine, even if she wanted to punch him just a little bit.

He shrugged. "You know, Alice was really looking forward to seeing you again when she returned." There was an edge in his voice, like he was taunting her with information. This was a game that Ben had always played and she'd despised him for it. Strange how Richard and Ben were on different sides now. And so she only shrugged. Richard looked off into the distance. If he was annoyed that she wasn't taking the bait, he didn't show it. When he started to speak anyway, she felt triumphant for a moment, like she'd won -- at least until his words registered. "She's traveling right now. Recruiting, on the mainland."

The air stilled in her lungs. It wasn't like Alice hadn't talked about recruiting -- hey, even the second-to-last day she'd seen her, Alice had been talking about, what? Olympic archers and NRA members. But the thought that Alice was on the mainland -- in other times? It was like being slammed into by something heavy. A Miami crosstown bus, maybe. The 27th Avenue Express. It was like falling through darkness into an endless hole, and she couldn't breathe for a moment. Alice was on the mainland, in any time she wanted? And Juliet just stayed here, day after day, year after year.

Ever since she'd woken up back here in November 1919, she and Richard had had long periods of hostility. But they'd made their peace once Richard had seen she really could talk to Jacob; they'd talked, planned, sorted things out. But now Richard was taking his revenge on her the only way he could; she'd killed one innocent man, had let another be killed, given away all their weapons and inspired panic among their entire side. She could have set them up for a bloodbath that had fortunately never come.

And she deserved this meanness from him. She did. But she couldn't face him, and she kept her face blank, looking away. He didn't say anything more, and she ignored him until finally his footsteps receded.

When her attention surfaced again, she noticed Jonah sitting all the way on the edge of the bench, his head tilted in interest as he watched two slightly older kids playing with a badminton set. "You know, I bet they'd let you play with them if you asked nicely and said please," she told him. He glanced over at her, hesitating. She nodded, offered an encouraging, if somewhat tight-lipped, smile. He stood and slowly approached, and oh God, did her heart swell when the little girl nodded and pointed to another racquet lying on the ground. She watched them a long awhile, swatting the birdie around incompetently, giggling and tripping.

That young couple caught her eye again, and she realized they were watching her. The young woman smiled, waved her over. "Hey. Juliet, right?" she asked. Juliet nodded. "Dunno if you remember us, I'm Fran, that's Sid. Like Sid Vicious, 'cept he's not." Fran waved her hand over the sandy dirt. "Have a seat. Just got these new recliners shipped in from Sears & Roebuck. Popcorn's in the microwave."

Sid nodded. "Yeah, Super Bowl's on later," he quipped.

Juliet let a small grin escape. She sat, leaned up against a tree.

"Listen, we're cooking up some rice and veggies and stuff." Fran pointed to a Dutch oven clattering away on a small cookstove. "Should be ready in a few, if you guys are hungry. We're trying to do the vegetarian thing, ourselves."

"Actually, that would be great. My son and I are... trying not to eat meat right now." That was an understatement if she'd ever heard one.

"Cool." Sid exhaled a thin stream of smoke. "So, you were, like ... with... him? The man in black?"

She shrugged. "He wasn't really there very much. Mostly I just kept to myself. It was kind of... twisted over there."

"Eh, this whole place is twisted. No one ever has the whole story. Good, bad, who the eff knows. You want a smoke?"

She shook her head. "Thanks, but no." They seemed so young, so ... happy. In this place, it seemed sort of refreshing. Very refreshing.

"When are you coming from?" Fran asked. No guarded warning like the people from her own camp. Her first camp. Or her... What? Fourth faction?

Juliet paused. She'd been out of time so long she had to calculate. "It would be about 2011 for me, I think. No, wait, 2012? June... Yeah, 2012. I think," she finished lamely, realizing that really, she had no idea anymore.

But Sid made a little impressed noise, took another drag on his cigarette. "Huh. Not bad. So have they legalized pot yet?"

"No idea. I haven't been back there in years." But she laughed. She hadn't thought she remembered how.

------ END FLASHBACK ------

They stand a few feet away from her father's gravestone and she realizes she's cringing a little. She steps back and drops onto a bench. "OK, this is kind of weird." He sits next to her, doesn't say anything. She shakes her head. "It's just going to make me so angry if Locke went back to the island."

"Because he got another chance."

"God, James, he's had _three_ other chances!" she bursts out. She takes a breath, tries to keep her voice in check. "I should never have told him what's been going on there. I should have known. He's just going to end up wasting his life." Juliet thinks again of the first time she'd craned her neck toward that monitor, had seen that paraplegic running -- she'd _known._ She'd known Jacob had really cured Rachel after all. As slaying as it had been to watch her sister and nephew on Richard's live feed, there'd still been a doubt that maybe Ben had faked her sister's test results, that the cancer had never actually come back. Of course, it turned out he had, but -- that belief, that her sister was healed and safe -- it made her believe in the island in ways she never had. In ways she'd never wanted to. "I wish -- " she shouldn't be saying this -- "I just used to wish I could send my dad back there, too."

God, that was a stupid thing to say. And so she tilts her head, watching him, wondering if he's thinking about his parents. April 8, 1976. That terrible day he'd stormed around their yellow house, the night he'd left and not come home until after midnight, almost frighteningly drunk.

She stands, tugs at his hand. "Come on. What's done is done, right?" James doesn't move; his gaze is fixed along the ground. She doesn't drop his hand, but he's still not standing, so she sits down again. Just waits and watches. Waits for him to say something.

He has to be thinking about his parents, and this is stupid, why had she dragged them both out here, and here she is whining about her dad, who'd really had a pretty good life up until the last three years and -- "I hope he didn't go back to the island neither," he says darkly, pulling his hand away.

"What?"

"Locke," he almost growls.

She shakes her head. "I don't understand..."

James swings around to face her, his forehead creased, his hands balled into fists. "Juliet, I swear to God -- " he chokes out.

"What?"

"Juliet, I swear to God, I tried so fuckin' _hard_ to get back there and no matter what I did, it wasn't good enough. If that bald bastard made it back there in less than two _months_ -- " He's shaking with anger, his eyes dark with unexpressed anger.

Her mouth forms a silent _oh_; why hadn't she considered that Locke's disappearance had to be weighing even more heavily on James? She knows how much guilt he still carries about not being able to get back to the island. But she's wordless, absent-mindedly rubbing her hand up and down his arm. "Will you just stop_ doin'_ that?" he exclaims, yanking his arm away.

She presses a hand to her eyes. _Visiting cemeteries when you're already stressed out about life is a stupid fucking thing to do. _"James, do you mind if I say something really Other-y that will probably only make you angrier?"

"Yes," he grumbles, but his expression softens some.

"I don't know, but I'm guessing that they wouldn't let you get back because you were only trying to go for selfish reasons. Like I only wanted to leave for selfish reasons." He starts to speak, but she holds up her hand. "I'm not trying to say that selfish reasons are bad, here. I'm just saying -- if someone knew Locke wanted to go, you know he was going for the war." She wonders what side Locke would end up on. (She wonders what side _she_ would have ended up on. Or should have.)

"That don't make it no easier."

"Of course not. But James, really -- I'm ready to go if you are." This time she waits for him to stand. When he does, he reaches for her hand and pulls her up, and she half-smiles at him, but her eyes are drawn to a flickering tree branch at the other end of the cemetery. Ed's side. He was a son of a bitch who'd cheated on her more times than she could probably wrap her mind around and he'd made her professional life hell, but she still didn't feel right about the fact that he'd been hit by the 27th Avenue Express on her behalf.

She pauses awkwardly, and James clears his throat. "Uh, y'know, we can go over there, if..."

_You know, a son of a bitch is still a son of a bitch, 27th Avenue Express or not._ "Let's go, James," she says firmly, and he lets her leave it at that. Just another reason she loves this man.

* * *

He's driving when they get lost, which makes her extra huffy. "I'm lost in my own hometown and you won't let me drive," she pouts.

"Yeah, well, you're s'posed to be the navigator, and unless I miss my guess, you ain't doin' all that hot."

"I thought it was exit 67, but..." But she can't remember how to find her mother's cemetery anymore, and the end of her sentence hangs in the air like a sad little raincloud. They see a sign, white letters on a charcoal gray background: Miami Central University. Juliet pauses, her expression unreadable. "Whoops. Guess I got my wires crossed."

"Where was your lab?"

"Couple blocks west of this entrance."

"You wanna...?"

"No. I'm supposed to be missing, remember? Someone could still be there who remembers me."

"K, if you're sure."

She shrugs. "It doesn't matter, it wasn't anything special."

In the defiant glitter of her eyes he sees the ways she's trying to convince herself.

* * *

They have lunch at a dim sum place around the corner from Juliet's old apartment, the last place she lived before Mittelos decided to get all up in her business. "I can't believe this place is still here," she marvels, grabbing a dumpling with her chopsticks. "I used to come here all the time."

"You take all your husbands here?" he asks her, poking the back of her hand with a chopstick.

She grins. "Nah, just the ones I like."

* * *

"So what's the deal with the rocks?" he asks her. He can't remember ever having been in a Jewish cemetery before, and many of the headstones have little rows of pebbles or rocks lined up on them. Some only have a single rock or two, and the one they're looking at has none.

"I don't really remember all the reasons anymore. I think it really just comes down to wanting to show you were here. And flowers die, after all."

"I hope you won't be offended if I tell ya I've had enough rocks to last me a few lifetimes already, thanks to your little chain gang." She covers her mouth but laughs anyway. Great, he just made her laugh at her mother's grave. Could he possibly lack any _more_ tact? Then again, she's the one laughing.

"Oh God, the runway. Sorry for that, by the way."

"Yeah, I just bet you are."

"Well, if it makes you feel any better, I'm sure the aliens appreciated it if they ever landed."

"Uh... Sun landed on that runway."

She does a double-take. "What?" He reminds her of Ajira 316, what the rest of them had been up to while Jack, Kate, Hurley and Sayid had been wreaking various types of havoc in 1977. Or, Jack, Kate and Sayid were, anyway. Hurley was mainly making waffles. She listens without commentary -- he'd forgotten that she'd still only heard bits and pieces of the Ajira side of the story -- but then she feels the need to offer one of her trademark recaps. "So what you're telling me is I forced you to do hard labor on a runway that ultimately led to Ben killing Jacob."

"Well, jeez, when you put it that way, it does sound kinda evil."

"Well -- " here she frowns, dropping the banter -- "I'm beginning to think that Jacob's best chance at winning the war would have happened this way. I mean, I sort of know he had all these plans before he died but... really, he could only win once he was out of his body. And somehow the bomb stopped him from being gone forever, but he's still... just water."

He's got his face screwed up, trying to understand, and she gives him a wry grin.

"Basically, it's only evil if you think Jacob's side is evil."

"And you still don't have no conclusions about that?"

"I know what people want me to think. And I know what I think. They don't really match." She shrugs. "And for that matter, I think I've had enough rocks in my lifetime, too," and he remembers what she'd told him, slamming the black rock down onto the bomb over and over, and he feels just the tiniest bit sick, even with her standing beside him right now. And why are they talking about this all in front of her mother's grave? It's like standing beside these headstones today has been getting her to unleash more than she normally would, and that can't be a bad thing, but they lapse into silence for a minute or so.

Finally she bends, takes a small rock from the ground at their feet. "I was here," she says to the sky, and they leave the rock behind.

* * *

"That's the one?" he asks, trying to follow where her finger is pointing.

"No, the next one over," she says, and he can't help but notice her eye roll at the house they're driving by slowly.

"Shit," he mutters. A wide flagstone driveway, framed by lush greenery, curves up to a huge Spanish-style house with tall multi-paned windows. The thing is freaking gorgeous, worth three or four mil, at least.

"I can't even tell you how unhappy I was in that house." She smiles at him, squeezes his hand, and steps on the accelerator.

* * *

The high school is at the end of a quiet street, wide front steps leading up to three sets of double doors under wide, white arches. "You know," he says, "if my high school had looked like this, maybe I wouldn't have dropped out."

She arches an eyebrow. "Hey, I have a G.E.D. now, too, remember?"

"Oh, yeah. So what in the hell are we doin' here then? Jeez, blondie, least I went back to school after," he teases her, but he doubles back to the trunk of their rental car. She watches him curiously, her head tilted. He fishes out the basketball he'd borrowed from Julian earlier this morning, tosses it to her in a wide over-handed arc. She plucks it from the air easily. "Rachel said the outdoor courts are around to the left."

Juliet grins. "That they are."

She doesn't let him win.

* * *

That night, Wednesday, is Rachel and Juliet's night out. Juliet's finishing getting ready -- she takes one last swipe at her smooth, straight hair, watching James in the mirror over her shoulder, before she unplugs the hairdryer. "Be nice tonight," she reminds him, coiling the electrical cord around the barrel of the hairdryer. "Brian's just trying to look out for Rachel."

James is nervous and tries not to show it, but after the sisters leave, he realizes Brian's not pushing things tonight, either. Hey, maybe Rachel had the same sort of conversation with Brian that Juliet had had with him, and they let Julian and Jonah take over the evening's activities. They order pizza and there's a marathon of Spider-Man movies, which easily hooks both boys, and Brian and James grab a couple of beers, claim opposite ends of the L-shaped couch. He can't tell if they've slipped into an uneasy silence or a companionable one, but he half-watches the movie, half-watches Jonah idly pushing Matchbox cars around on the floor when the "boring girl" parts are on.

The house has one of those open Floridian floorplans, and James can see through to the dining room table, already partially set for tomorrow, and... it's almost strange, anticipating tomorrow's celebration, Thanksgiving with family. OK, so he's not good with a turkey -- and Juliet had already warned him she hasn't dealt with a Thanksgiving dinner since roughly 1999, and if they hadn't been at Rachel's this year, they'd probably have been eating spaghetti. But Cassidy's always had Clem on Thanksgiving, except for that one disastrous year with that awful fucking turkey nightmare, and the last time he was part of a real family Thanksgiving was -- when? Right before his Uncle Doug died, he guesses, and that was just too many years to count.

So now he's just sitting here with his fellow menfolk, watching his nephew sprawled out on the rug next to his son -- his son, who'd just dropped out of the sky, or so it seemed, earlier this year. And there's a ring on his finger where he thought they'd never be one, and his wife is out with her sister, having dinner and seeing La Traviata for probably the millionth time in her life, and here he is having a beer with his brother-in-law, and turkey or not, all of this seems pretty damn OK to him.

* * *

**Sorry folks, ended up being really busy this week. And I feel compelled to tell you all that I originally got the idea for this story when I was in Miami last fall. I go there a couple times a year usually. And my flight back from Miami when I was starting to pencil this story out? Was Flight 816. NOT KIDDING.**

**Anyway, this Miami/Thanksgiving part will was supposed to only be one chapter, but now it's going to be two. So please don't listen to me when I say how long this is going to be -- can you believe my original outline was for 24 chapters? At this point I'm looking at 67 chapters, which means I'll be writing this Post-S5 fic waaaay into S6, so I hope you'll all still keep following along.**

**Please leave a review!**


	54. Liemstal

**Note: This chapter goes slightly back in time to cover more of Wednesday.**

_

* * *

"Something in the way he said this gave me the feeling that the dynamic was moving on, perhaps down the block, where it would serve some other confused family."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

Juliet twists the water out of her hair and wraps a towel around her bathing suit. Late fall in Miami still means 77 degrees today -- ugh, 77, another one of those numbers that just seems to come up everywhere -- and that's still enough for pool weather.

She settles down on the lounge chair, watching Julian and Jonah splashing around with dive sticks. The glass door slides open; she turns expecting to see Rachel back from the grocery store, or James up from his nap (she was ready to tease him about jet lag), but there was Brian, still dressed in his casual not-quite-a-workday attire. Brian was a tax attorney and generally stayed at the office long hours. Rachel had given him a hard time about working today, the day before Thanksgiving, and he'd promised to make it a half-day ("No one else is even going in, are they?" she'd challenged him) and of course it was near 4 p.m. now.

"Hey," he said, plopping down on the lounge chair next to Juliet.

"Hey yourself."

"Hi, Dad!" Julian bellowed from the pool, and Brian saluted him. Juliet couldn't suppress a grin. Although Rachel and Brian had been together for years, their wedding wasn't until January. But the kid was already calling him Dad. Back before Juliet had begun her experiments on Rachel, they'd had roughly, oh, a million conversations on the hypotheticals, should those experiments actually work. Neither of them had been blind to the fact that Juliet eventually could have ended up raising a niece or nephew alone. And now here was this happy, healthy, normal kid with two parents, and an aunt and uncle and cousin (and even a step-cousin, albeit one he hadn't met, back in Oregon). All that family, where instead there had been the potential for nothing. If that isn't the meaning of Thanksgiving, she doesn't know what is.

"How's the water?" Brian is asking her.

"Perfect." Amazing that there was a time when she sat here in an old sweatshirt, not talking, refusing to eat. It all seems like a bad dream by now. _(At least until the next headache.)_

He walks over to the pool, skims a hand over the glassy surface. The boys rope him into tossing their dive sticks for awhile. Juliet notices a manila folder Brian had left on his lounge chair. Bringing work even to the backyard pool? Rachel is not going to like this one bit.

After awhile he returns to the chair, water droplets splattered over his khakis and button-down shirt. He picks up the envelope before he sits, facing her, holding the envelope awkwardly in both hands, his knees propped on his elbows. "Um..." he says.

_Oh boy, this can't be good._ She watches him guardedly.

"Rachel told me not to do this, so she's probably going to kill me, but bear in mind I'm just trying to help you, OK?"

"OK," she says cautiously.

"I'm not sure if you know this, but Mittelos Bioscience dropped off the radar completely after you disappeared. You know that Newsweek story on them, and your disappearance?"

She nods.

"Well, once those reporters started sniffing around, that was it, they were gone. But I've done a bit of digging."

Juliet's stomach does a little flip, although she's not sure why, or what this is leading up to. Or maybe she is.

"Did you know that Mittelos actually paid taxes?"

Her face twists in surprise. "You're kidding."

"Trust me, we were surprised, too. Well, all the names and addresses lead to dead ends, of course. But you know what Deep Throat said in the leadup to Watergate, right?"

Hey, she hadn't spent three years reading magazines in the '70s for nothing, right? "Follow the money."

"Exactly. So what I was able to find out is that somewhere in late 2002, early 2003, they transferred their assets into another company, Liemstal."

"Sounds like a piece of IKEA furniture."

He laughs. "Weird name, sure, but here's where it gets even weirder. My assistant found evidence of this same company -- supposedly with the same people at the helm, same names, anyway -- back in the 1980s. So she did more digging, found them in the '50s, too. Apparently back then, a company by this name recruited a whole bunch of archers who'd been in the running to compete in the 1952 Olympics. Recruited... as in, they disappeared, too."

Yeah, of course they did. She makes sure the grade-A poker face is in place, but doesn't say anything. This really is her best weapon: Silence makes people nervous. So they keep talking, revealing more than they'd planned, giving her time to discover their weak spots.

Brian doesn't quite fall for it, though. "Why is it you don't look surprised?"

"Just trying to absorb the information."

"Well, they're obviously using fake names, to have the same people supposedly running the company through all these decades. Unless they're incredibly old."

Yeah, or unless they're time travelers and immortals. A sudden laugh threatens to erupt, and she has to work hard to deny the impulse to start giggling. Her lips twitch once, twice, and then she gets the mask back. "So what do you expect me to do with this information?" she asks him. "Sue them?"

Brian shakes his head. "That's entirely up to you. I just thought maybe you'd like to know." He extends the envelope to her.

She looks at it for a moment, trying to decide if she even wants to take it, and decides she doesn't, she's out of this, she's done, she's retired -- but for some reason her hand is reaching for it, and she feels the cool, rough texture of the dark yellow envelope against her fingers. Decision made.

* * *

James doesn't stir when she returns to the guest room, and she's pulling down the straps of her bathing suit, getting ready to take a shower, when she realizes that although his eyes closed, they're not _quite_ shut all the way. And also, sleeping people don't tend to be smirking like that.

"You know you're _allowed_ to look, right?"

He opens his eyes the rest of the way. "Just wanted to see what sorta show I could get if I kept up the con."

"Oh, really?" She falls onto the bed and gives him a huge hug, soaking him through his clothes.

He howls in protest. "What'd you do, go swimmin' at the North Pole?"

"Yep, pretty much." She squeezes him one last time, making sure to wipe her wet hair across his T-shirt before releasing him.

He pinches her gently in an interesting place. "You know this means I'm gonna reek of chlorine unless I take a shower, now, too, don't you?"

She can't hold back a grin, and she's already sliding the straps of her bathing suit the rest of the way down. "Huh. Now why hadn't I even thought of that?"

"Y'know, I'd be happy to help you with that suit," he said, trying to sound innocent and failing horribly at it. He pulls her underneath him, dragging the wet fabric off her, inch by inch, kissing each bit of skin as he reveals it. Juliet lets out a happy sigh, gasping a little as he scrapes his teeth over her ribs.

He slides a hand under the back of her neck, drops his head down for a long kiss. When they break apart, panting slightly, she says, "So, about that shower..."

"Just shut up already."

She happily complies.

* * *

Juliet closes her eyes as the music washes over her. It's all perfect as long as she never thinks of listening to these notes on CD in her little yellow house two doors down from Ben. But those memories are vanquished when she opens her eyes again and slides her eyes over to her sister. Opera was _so _not Rachel, but she'd started going along with it eventually anyway. Rachel was always the badass sister, not interested in dorky things like chemistry or classical music. Nah, Rachel was the one with too many boyfriends, the one who sneaked out at least two nights a week in 10th grade, went AWOL on Christmas one year.

And yet, it was the shy, quiet, geeky sister who ended up tromping through the jungle killing people. Sometimes life just didn't make any sense, did it?

"You're different, you know," Rachel had told her during her visit back in August.

"Different how?"

"Come on, don't try to tell me you're still the same person you were when you left."

"Rachel, it's been twelve years. _You're_ not the same person you were when I left, either."

"You know what I mean, though. You don't take any shit from anyone anymore."

"And you say that like it's a bad thing?"

"Nah, it was just a lot easier to get you to do what I wanted before." Rachel arched an eyebrow. If eyebrow arching was a sport, the Carlson sisters could have medaled in it, no doubt.

"I'm still the same person. I just grew up a little. And I straighten my hair more often now." _And I've killed more people that I can count on two hands._ She shrugs. "Big deal."

"Tell me something."

"What?"

"I don't know, anything. Tell me something you haven't before."

About a million options flew through her head, none of them good. "I don't know," she said hesitantly.

"See, but that's the old Juliet talking. You do know. Come on, just anything."

"One day Jonah saw me kill a chicken."

Rachel's face twists. "Jesus, Juliet!"

"Well, seriously, what did you want me to tell you?"

Her sister considered this. "I don't know. I guess... I mean... I don't know, I guess."

"Sometimes it's better just not knowing things. Trust me."

Now Juliet thinks back on that whole little theory of hers. Better to not know? Really. It was. After all, that was why she and James had driven Miles to the airport two weeks ago and James had slapped him on the back, and Juliet had just waved at Miles, smiling politely, ignoring how relieved the guy looked when she didn't step any closer.

But La Traviata: James had asked her what the title meant when they were on the plane.

"Fallen Woman," she told him without thinking.

"Huh." He paused awkwardly.

"They mean, you know, sinful or whatever," she replied, equally awkwardly. "Not... not actually... falling."

"No, I mean... yeah, I know." They looked at each other out of the corners of their eyes, not saying what they were thinking.

Miles wanted to spare them by not saying anything; they wanted to spare Miles from having to tell them. And she wanted to spare her sister from knowing the worst parts -- even the somewhat believable (non-supernatural, non-time traveling) parts. She wanted to spare her sister from knowing how that introverted, innocent sister managed to pull a trigger over and over without even batting an eye.

And maybe she wanted to spare herself, too. Spare herself from having to face her sister's judgment. At her worst moments, Juliet still tells herself she's not a good person and she deserved whatever she got. But some days, lately, she's been catching herself thinking maybe she's been through enough after all, and she just deserves to have a quiet, normal life like the rest of them. It isn't such a bad thought to have.

Liemstal? Who cares? Why should she even worry about that?

* * *

After the show, Juliet and Rachel stop in at a bar, the music still ringing in their heads. They're giddy with the rare night of freedom, no men, no kids. "I don't know about you, Jules, but some days I feel about a hundred years old," Rachel says as she sips her wine.

_Try getting your mind around the fact that Calvin Coolidge isn't in the White House anymore._ "Yeah, me too."

"Oh, did I tell you? I finally got all our RSVPs in..." and Rachel's off and talking about her wedding. Juliet would never have pictured Rachel having a big wedding, to be honest, but Brian had a huge, extended Irish-Catholic family and they were going all-out. The wedding planning usually made Juliet's eyes glaze over, but even she had to admit she was looking forward to returning to Miami in January and see her big sister walk down the aisle.

That would probably be one of the only times Juliet was glad they had literally no extended family of their own. No one would be there to ask too many questions about where the hell she'd been.

Meanwhile, telling Rachel about her courthouse wedding had been a little bit... challenging. "So, do anything fun this weekend?" Rachel asked her over the phone the Monday afterward.

It was the perfect "in" -- except why did Juliet suddenly feel so tongue-tied? "Well, I... well, I..." Finally she just said it all in a rush. "I got married on Friday, does that count?"

"You _WHAT?_"

"I got married on Friday. Does that count as fun?"

"You're actually..._ serious?"_

"Yeah. Last I checked." Juliet showily inspected her left hand; even though Rachel was on the phone and couldn't actually see her, the gesture just seemed appropriate.

"You got _married?_ You didn't invite me?" Rachel sounded genuinely hurt. And angry, of course.

"Rach, we just went to the courthouse."

"I assume you didn't just get up that morning and decide to stop by on your way out for coffee," she said snippily. "How long were you planning on this?"

Her sister was right; she should have told her beforehand. "A couple of weeks," she admitted.

"You suck, you know that? I'm really upset you didn't tell me!"

"Well, I'm telling you now."

Rachel sighed. "I'm still not married and now my baby sister has beaten me to the altar twice."

"I'm really sorry about that. We thought about waiting, 'til after January, but it's not like anyone else in our massive family will notice. We just wanted to get it done. I'm really sorry for not telling you beforehand, Rachel."

Rachel sighs. "Did you at least not wear jeans?"

"We did not wear jeans."

"OK, I'm feeling a little better. Uh... Did I say congratulations yet?"

Juliet knew that if she'd pulled something like this in the old days -- not that she ever would have, but just hypothetically -- Rachel would have stopped speaking to her for at least a week. But the advantage of disappearing and being held against her will for a dozen years meant that she had a lot more leeway than usual. That was one on the plus side, at least.

* * *

On the morning of Thanksgiving, they're awoken by a pitiful whine outside their bedroom door. "Mamaaaa?"

James groans and forces himself from the bed, pulling on his clothes. Juliet's only aware of a painful scratchiness in the back of her throat and starts to burrow under her pillow. "One sec, little guy," James calls toward the door. "Psst," he hisses, poking her in the ribs. "Get dressed."

"Ungh," she groans, but manages to find her tank top, undies and PJ pants from the floor. Her entire head is throbbing and she's undeniably stuffed up, but she dresses as quickly as possible before flopping back down onto the bed.

James goes to unlock the door and Jonah is standing there holding his pillow, looking about as pathetic as Juliet feels. "My throat hurts," he whimpers.

"Mine too, buddy, come over here," Juliet croaks. James scoops him up and plops Jonah in the bed next to Juliet, who lays the back of her hand across his forehead. "No fever, but I'd say we're sick. Does your head hurt you?"

Jonah nods. "And my throat feels all hurty."

James is watching them, his head bouncing back and forth like he's watching a tennis match. "What do you think it is?" he asks anxiously, leaning forward, one knee on the bed.

"Why don't you lie down with me?" Juliet says to Jonah, who curls up next to her, looking miserable, with his head on her stomach. She looks up at James. "I think it's a cold, James. We must have gotten it on the plane, all that recycled air. Incubation period seems about right."

"I feel OK, though," he says, worried.

"Of course you do." She sees his confusion. "Don't worry. I'm actually amazed it's taken this long, but I've sort of been expecting this to happen."

"You have? Why?"

"Because, think about it, James. No one ever got sick on the island. Hurt, yes, but not sick. Jonah's never been exposed to anything his entire life. I haven't been exposed to anything for twelve years. We're probably going to catch every single cold that crosses our paths this winter." She snakes a hand out to the end table, pulls a tissue from the box. She holds it under Jonah's nose. "Blow."

"Crap. So what should I do?"

"Well... Could you go out and find us some cold medicine?"

"Yeah." He springs into action, tying on his shoes.

"Do they still make those tissues with the lotion in them?" She knows she sounds pathetic, but her first cold in a dozen years is sort of making her feel that way. _This sucks. How do people deal with these two or three times a year?_

"Yeah. They even make 'em antibacterial, now."

"Ooh, yeah, get those."

He stands. "Anythin' else? Little J?"

"Popsicles," Jonah whimpers.

"Good idea," Juliet says approvingly.

"You know Rachel's gonna say you did this on purpose to get out of cookin' today."

"I was just thinking that myself."

After he leaves, she snuggles down under the covers with Jonah, turning her head so she can no longer see the manilla envelope on the top of the dresser. "This is kinda nice, isn't it, buddy?"

"No, we're sick," he whines.

"Yeah, that part isn't any good, is it?"

"Nope."

But she can't help a half-smile. They're sick, but James is taking care of them. And she and Jonah used to sleep together like this every night on the island. She'd known, back then, that the time was coming when she would have had to track down another bed, or a cot, or something, that he was getting too big for this. But it wasn't uncommon in that time for children to sleep with their parents, and it was nice. She always knew he was safe, was protected.

(She hopes in whatever time, whatever place he is as an adult, he's still safe and protected. That's not too much to ask for, is it?)

* * *

"Ugh, I don't understand how you can do that."

"What?" James asks, stepping back from the counter.

Juliet shuffles into the kitchen in late morning, still in her PJs and flip-flops. "Microwave old coffee. That's disgusting. It completely changes the taste." She pulls a tissue from her pocket and blows her nose.

"Eh, it's fine. And when'd you get to be such a purist, anyway?" He crosses his arms over his chest.

"I don't know, maybe once I started drinking coffee made with water that didn't come from a creek." She arches an eyebrow and he swats at her ass as she walks past, only to turn her head when she notices Rachel standing in the doorway. She never makes jokes about the island to Rachel; Rachel would start wondering why Juliet could even joke about it at all.

_It's Thanksgiving, Rachel, please don't start_, she thinks. But her sister just grins. _Thank you, thank you._ "Creek water coffee, huh? Don't think I've ever seen that one on the Starbucks menu," and she steps further into the kitchen, opening the fridge.

Juliet sags in relief as Rachel starts hauling out sweet potatoes, and she turns her attention back to James. "Seriously, I was just about to make some coffee anyway, seeing as you didn't bring me any this morning."

"Sorry, your majesty, I was too busy trackin' down those tissues with the lotion in them."

"Ooh, but those tissues are soooo awesome."

Rachel interjects then. "OK, sorry to interrupt your creepy flirting, but Jules, you're not touching anything in my kitchen. I'm not letting you contaminate our Thanksgiving dinner with your crappy-immune-system germs." Rachel reaches back into the fridge and retrieves a can of coffee grounds, holds them out to James. "James, quit your yapping and make my sister some coffee."

Juliet smiles triumphantly and sits down at the table.

"Y'know," James grumbles as he dragged out the coffeemaker, "if I didn't know any better, I'd say you two just conned me."

Rachel smirks. "And how do you know we didn't?"

* * *

All in all, it turns out to be a pretty good Thanksgiving.


	55. Oxford

_"My heart fell because I hadn't planned anything for my future beyond this meeting."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

They're halfway through their flight when James sees that Juliet's eyes have drifted over from Neverwhere to focus on him. OK, so he hasn't quite been paying attention to the Miami Herald crossword puzzle in front of him. "Stuck?"

He leans back in his seat. "Hell no. Way too smart to be stuck."

"Of course you are." Juliet slides her bag out from the seat in front of her. "If you're bored, you can finish this." She pulls out her library copy of A Brief History of Time, smirking at him as he crinkles his forehead.

"I already read the damn thing twice."

"Yeah, but in _this_ decade? Come on, I did all that studying just to be able to understand five percent of what'll come out of his mouth."

"Lemme-think-about-it-no."

"Real mature, James." She smacks him on the arm with the book. Stupid fucking Stephen Hawking. "So, still hate flying?" she asks conversationally.

"Huh, how'd you guess?" He shifts slightly, glances around the plane. "OK, I dunno if this is all that likely to come up at Faraday's tomorrow, but, uh..."

"What?"

"Well, y'know how we all tried to piece together what we could? Faraday was pretty much unreachable for awhile, and there was no way in hell I was talkin' about any of this to the Doc, but I spent some time with Locke, and he told me, uh... Listen, you remember those guys who almost cut off your hand?"

"Funny how you just never forget a minor detail like that."

He gives her a look that translates roughly into, _Hey now, I'm supposed to be the sarcastic one here_. She raises an eyebrow in response, somewhere along the lines of, _Keep dreaming that you're the only sarcastic one_. "All right, all right, wiseass. What I'm tryin' to say is that it was 1954, right? One of those guys was Charles Widmore."

She makes a strange face he can't quite identify. Doesn't say anything.

"You may not have ever known this, but believe it or not, Others can play tricks."

"Weird," she finally says.

"An' turns out, Widmore just happens to be the mad scientist's daddy."

That obviously surprises her. "Now you're just making things up to see if I'm paying attention."

"Yeah, well, it ain't like Chuckie's gonna win father of the year. They don't really speak, far as I can tell."

She shrugs. "That's probably a good thing."

"Yeah, well, just wanted you to know, case Mr. Wizard lets it slip or somethin'."

"OK, if we're planning to have confession time -- I should probably tell you that I saw Daniel on the island in 1925."

"You what?"

"Here's the weirdest part -- he was old when I saw him."

_Jesus, the things that come outta her mouth._ "What?"

"He was in his mid-sixties," she says matter-of-factly.

James shakes his head slowly. What the hell is she even talking about? Maybe he should pick up that damn Hawking book after all.

"Remember how I told you they were bringing them in from all over? Well, the Daniel I saw back there was coming from 2042. And I have this crazy idea that he's about to spend most of the next 29 years working on the stuff I tell him this weekend."

"So he can eventually go back there."

"At least if 'whatever happened, happened' can hold."

"Let's hope, I guess."

"You know there's going to be some things tomorrow you haven't heard before, right?" she asks gently.

He nods.

"I might ask you to leave. If I do -- please don't get angry."

He doesn't try to hold in his frustrated sigh.

* * *

Juliet can tell by Daniel Faraday's tight-lipped smile that he's not really happy to see them, and they skip all but the slightest pleasantries. She feels bad for him, really, that's he's being forced to mentally revisit his years of grief over Charlotte -- the same woman he'd left at home this morning, alive and whole. His wife.

She and James settle on an ancient brown leather couch in his office and Daniel perches obediently on the edge of a faded green armchair. A thin layer of dust coats the bowed metal desk to her right, and she realizes Miles was right when he'd claimed Dan hadn't been working. The plants on the windowsill are shriveled, seventy-five percent dead.

"You didn't believe me on the phone about Jacob and his brother," she begins, delicately. "Um..." She cringes inwardly. "Did you talk to your mother?"

"Uh... yeah," he mumbles, tearing a page from a blank pad of paper, crumpling it in his fist. "She, uh, she pretty much said what you said."

"I know it's hard, hearing about them when you're coming from a scientific background." _I know it's hard, talking to the mother who killed you in another lifetime. _Juliet always feels like she's speaking with a child when she talks to him. Sure, a child with an IQ of about 200, but Daniel's gentleness always slays her to the core. "Believe me, it look me years to believe any of it myself, but I'm going to need you to give me the benefit of the doubt for this, all right?"

He nods. "Yeah. I can do that. You said on the phone... well, why don't you give me the two-minute version first, and we can just go from there?"

_There is no two-minute version of ANYthing to do with the island,_ she thinks. Daniel of all people should know that.

James reaches down, pulls Juliet's green notebook from her bag. "Here," he says gruffly, shoving the notebook at Dan. "She, uh, she took a bunch of notes for ya."

"You can look at that after we go," Juliet tells Daniel. "I just tried to sum everything up for you in there so you'd have it."

She sees, in her mind's eye, the faded green notebook that Daniel had carried everywhere in the jungle in 1925. And then, two months ago, she'd gone to find a notebook to keep for him -- and she stopped dead in her tracks in the office supplies aisle at Target. There it was -- shiny, new, unwrinkled, but undeniably the same green notebook he'd carried with him back there. And she'd felt an inexplicable, unexpected surge of joy at these pieces clicking together. Like maybe this could ever be solved.

"Thanks," Daniel says politely to James as he leans over to hand him the notebook. James nods once, deeply, slowly, trying to be polite toward the twitchy little guy on the couch -- but the tilt and jerk of his head conveys maybe something a little sarcastic -- and she flashes him a muted warning look. Daniel just always drove James crazy, one of those inherent personality clashes that will never quite resolve itself, no matter what decade they happen to be in.

"So, uh..." Daniel lines up the corner of the notebook with the corner of the coffee table. He's jiggling his leg against the edge of his chair, absent-mindedly shredding the edges of the paper ball he holds in his hands. Juliet hopes she won't treat the green notebook that way, but then she remembers. He won't.

"OK. I have to warn you at this point that I'm not even sure what's fact, what's theory and what I just sort of supernaturally know. Also, the people from the future were giving me information, but when I think about it, maybe they got that information because I'm telling you now." _Shit._ She's trying to NOT let Daniel know that she's seen him in the island in the future.

Maybe that goes right over Daniel's head, or not, but his brown eyes slide out of focus for a moment and then lock onto her face again. "Go ahead, and we'll sort it out later."

"So, obviously the bomb caused a reset of sorts. Except that I didn't get a reset, and Ben didn't -- or chose not to."

"What about you?" Daniel nods at James, who shrugs.

"In a way, James did remember subconsciously, because he..." Because he what? Stopped being a tremendous asshole during his second time in 2004? "Because he did things differently, and some of it was reminiscent of our time in the '70s -- he had a security job for awhile."

"Sucked compared to Dharmaville," James offers.

"Right," Daniel says impatiently. "But we didn't think anyone would remember, after."

James throws an arm over the back of the couch. "August 16, 2007, for you too, champ?"

Daniel nodded. "Naomi had come in 2004 again to recruit me for the freighter, but I... just had a bad feeling."

"So 'whatever happened, happened' isn't working the same way," Juliet says. "And sometimes it seems to, but sometimes it doesn't. I saw myself once, in 1923. Another one of me, I mean, coming from the future. And then two years later, when I was on the opposite side of that conversation, it played out exactly as it had before. Even though I wanted to try to change something, just to see if I could... I didn't."

James is staring at her with open-mouthed surprise. "You talked... to yourself?"

"Mm hm."

"An' what was _that_ like, Gemini?"

She realizes he's a little bit fascinated, and she'll seriously kick his ass all the way back to 1925 if he makes a threesome joke in front of Daniel. "Weird. Very, very weird. Both times."

"So uh..." Daniel twists in his chair. "Is it that you didn't change anything when you saw yourself again, or that you couldn't?"

"I don't know. It was just... That's what it was, you know? That's what happened."

He's nodding to himself, mumbling, so she decides to just press on.

"But then sometimes there's the opposite effect. Ben killed Jacob in 2007, but after that, Jacob was just dead across all times. It wasn't like he was still alive before 2007 -- he was just always dead."

"'Cept he ain't," James points out.

"Well, right. Jacob's body is dead, but he's still conscious. This is going to sound really strange, but... he's water."

"What do you mean, he's water?"

"He's just -- his consciousness resides in water. I can talk to him. In the ocean. He _is_ the ocean. All I have to do is open my eyes, and I don't need to breathe as long as I'm down there. There's a series of short time flashes so I keep skipping over the same moment, and I don't have to go up for air."

"And you can... talk to him? In your head?" Daniel's eyebrows knit together in confusion and she knows she has to steer this conversation back to the things that Daniel actually has a chance in hell of helping her with.

"I don't know. A side effect of the bomb, maybe. Could the bomb even do that? Or the electromagnetism? Something strange happened to Desmond, too, after the Swan imploded in 2004. But how could Jacob just be alive in all times, but then I set off the bomb, and now it's all different?"

Daniel leans back, steeples his fingers. This is obviously an easy one for him. "If it's midnight in England and 4 p.m. in Oregon, what time did I call you?"

"You mean it happens at the same time... Just not the time on a clock."

"Exactly."

"I have a theory on why I didn't get a reset, but... what do you think?"

"You're the one who... who actually detonated the bomb, right? Manually?"

She nods, trying to keep her expression neutral.

"Well, if you'd had a reset, then you never would have set off the bomb."

"That's what I was thinking, too." But she can't quite prevent the bitter expression that distorts her face. After a second, though, she forces it away, because she knows if it weren't for that bomb, Daniel and Charlotte wouldn't even be alive. "Right. OK. That makes sense. But what about Ben?"

"You said Ben killed this... this Jacob, right? And that it seemed like as a result of the bomb, his... his consciousness remained?"

"Yeah."

"Well, if Ben had gotten a reset, that would... have undone his actions, as well. Maybe you were _meant_ to detonate the bomb, and... and Ben was meant to kill Jacob. You'd said those actions sort of went together, right? Two sides of the same coin."

She wills herself to not throw up on the coffee table, hearing herself be paired up with Ben like that. "At any rate, Jacob and his brother are at war. And his brother still has a body, so who knows? Jacob's side -- they were bringing in people from all times. The 1950s, the 1980s. The 2040s. The 22nd century." She tries her best to fill him on on the underground station, the counterpart to the Orchid. That's a huge gaping hole in her knowledge and she kicks herself now for not getting someone to tell her about it, teach her how to use it. So much for staying uninvolved.

Dan takes notes rapidly as she speaks, her eyes on a curling photograph of Charlotte propped up on a bookshelf. In the picture, Charlotte's wearing a wide-brimmed khaki hat, looking just off to the side, laughing, somewhere in a desert. _Thank you, reset_, Juliet thinks, the thought springing to her mind uninvited.

She realizes she's trailed off, focuses on Daniel again. "And they were fighting across all times. I fought in a battle at the Black Rock shortly after it landed." James is silent and still beside her; she's already explained this to him as best she could, but she sneaks a peek at him and he squeezes her hand.

Juliet tries to explain about the redone battles, the ambushes. "But those things didn't always happen -- Jacob told me that himself. And I don't think I was always there -- not like we were always in the '70s in Dharma."

"Why don't you think you were always there?"

"I don't know. Jacob told me I was never supposed to be there. I think his plans before the bomb had to change, after the bomb. But Richard sent me forward in time, back to that flaming arrow night. Before I went, he told me I'd always been there. But when I was back there again? I just watched the entire thing and didn't do anything. When I returned, he said he'd just wanted to see what I thought about causality."

"And did... did you believe him?"

"Now that I think about it, no. I think he wanted to see what he thought about causality. To see if I could do something that hadn't been done before."

"Did you?"

"Well. No."

"And you think it was because you weren't always there. Not -- that you were always there, and... just never did anything?" Daniel sounds skeptical, but opens the green notebook to a blank page and scribbles something in pencil.

She shrugs. "I don't know. Cause and effect just seemed dead there sometimes. You know what you told us, a long time ago -- or I guess technically it never even happened for you and James, did it? But you told us how time travel is like a street. And you can go back and forth on the street but you can't build a new street." God, that first day, the first day they'd ever time-traveled. She doesn't even remember anymore what that first flash felt like, deadened on Dharma rum._ Focus, Juliet, focus._

"Well, that's what I thought at the time." He starts mumbling about people being variables and then about diffeomorphism invariant quantities._ Focus, Daniel, focus._

"The people from the future -- the people who traveled back after the bomb -- had a new theory. After the bomb, time on the island changed. Time's as if you're drawing a line. But something came along and knocked into the pencil, and --

"And that line turned into a scribble." Daniel's forehead creases. "And the longer you scribble, the tighter the knots get, right?"

Did he just invent his own theory after hearing one line of it? "And if you keep scribbling, eventually you can't tell the beginning or the end anymore."

He's nodding rapidly, his hair brushing along his forehead in time with the bobs of his head. "So time on the island is converging."

"Every now and then, I got sucked into different times without trying to. Not a white flash. More like a wormhole. Not at first, but then it started happening more often. But Daniel, if that goes on for too long..."

"Time would collapse." Daniel rocks on the edge of his chair. He starts muttering, "inside... inside, the fabric of the universe collapses into a point of infinite curvature."

Sure, that makes perfect sense. Absolutely. What are they doing here, again? "A singularity, right?" Juliet prompts. "The island could become a singularity, maybe?" Ugh, that awful stack of library books... All that loop quantum gravity crap.

"And inside a singularity the laws of physics no longer apply."

"Anyone wanna translate?" James grumbles.

Juliet doesn't quite understand all this herself -- after all, that's why they're here in the first place, right? But she can't help egging him on a little. "You know, James, if you'd bothered to do the assigned reading..."

He gives her a dirty look. "All right, Science Club, I get it, I guess. So the bomb worked in its own way for us. It prevented 815 from crashin', saved Dan and Red, kept Jacob from disappearin' altogether. But it didn't just reset things, it went too far. And you're sayin' -- at least, I think you're sayin' -- we need to bookend it. Cause some other event to occur, create some sort of end point." He's gripping the arms of his chair and she realizes he's thinking about another bomb, but she doesn't think a bomb is what this is about at all.

Juliet nods, turning to Daniel. "That's right, isn't it? Otherwise, time is going to keep changing. My memories change sometimes, Dan. People were able to move through time fairly easily before I'd left the island. And it kept getting easier. And really, if things can change, then anything can still happen."

"Jonah's scar," James mutters.

Juliet nods, and Daniel looks at them questioningly.

"Jonah's our son. The one I told you about, the one I had on the island? Last week James was giving him a bath, and he saw something on the side of his arm -- a burn mark. Pretty small, but he'd never seen it before, and it was fully healed. Jonah and I couldn't remember where he'd gotten it at first -- and then we did. When he was three years old, he was reaching out for something, and burned his arm on the side of a hot kettle."

"But he didn't always," Dan croaks, his eyes lighting up.

"Exactly. We also remember when he didn't have it -- I remember pushing his arm out of the way in time, and he didn't get burned. So something tiny must have changed that day, and I was looking the wrong way for just a second, but something did change."

Daniel scribbles in the green notebook for a minute or two, looking enthralled at this new development, like this is all a science experiment. Like it's none of their lives. But it is. It could be. And after a moment he raises his head. "So anyone who's been on that island after the bomb could still end up getting hurt. Or worse."

All of a sudden she feels incredibly tired. "Yeah. And I need you to figure out how to prevent that from happening."

"Juliet, this sort of thing -- it's too big. It could take years," Daniel hedges. "Decades."

_You're absolutely right. _"I know," she says gently. "But there's one other problem."

"What's that?"

"Jacob wants to drown the island. And we need to figure out if we want him to."


	56. You Don't Strike Me as an Optimist

**About that certain scene at the beginning of 6x01 -- I know I've already said this to a few of you, but... maybe I should have been excited by the coincidence, but honestly, I'm really QUITE bummed that something that was supposed to be such a huge part of my story ended up happening on the show. DAMMIT! I mean, it's sort of cool but mainly I'm just cranky and depressed about it. Those Lost writers stole my idea! ;) That said, this story won't incorporate anything from Season 6, so if you haven't seen it yet or live somewhere they haven't aired it yet, don't worry about being spoiled or anything. All similarities post-S5 are completely coincidental.**

_

* * *

"More likely, I was just feeling the old loss, in a new way."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

------ FLASHBACK (1923) ------

_"So,_ JuJu."

"About the war."

"You won't believe me," he said cheerfully.

"Try me."

"It won't help you any. It'll only make things worse for you."

In the back of her mind, she heard Richard's words from two years earlier._ If people here knew what they were really working for, the balance could shift._

"Tell me anyway," she said.

He sighed. "What you did changed time. And it changed my brother's plans. Everything he'd so carefully constructed, all the people he'd chosen to come here, everything -- gone. Because of you."

She stayed silent.

"Now he's nothing. He's just water. The problem, of course, with being water, is there's only one thing he can do."

"Yeah, and what's that?" she challenged him.

When he spoke again, it felt like she'd always known. "He wants to drown the island."

So she lied. "You're right. I don't believe you."

"Yes, you do," he said easily. "You just don't want to. And if Jacob's people knew what they were working for, they'd never be working for him."

"That's what Richard said. He said it came down to loyalty or survival."

"It does."

"Funny, I thought survival would be with Jacob."

"Sounds like you had it all wrong," he said archly. "And now that you know, you'll lose your desire to serve Jacob, too."

"But what's to say you won't choke out everyone on the island?"

"Nothing. But at least the island itself would still be here when I'm done. You can't say the same of my brother."

"I know."

"And I would spare you, of course. I'd have to, as my brother won't allow you to be killed. Ironic, since if he drowned the island, you'd be drowned too."

"And you'd be drowned, wouldn't you? Even as smoke."

"Only if the water went high enough. But in that case, yes, I would drown, too. And then my brother could just carry on with his pathetic little existence for the rest of eternity."

There was something about this that didn't quite make sense. "So why hasn't he done it yet?"

"Because he's waiting for your help."

Her stomach clenched. "What?"

"I'm sorry, JuJu, but you can't expect me to tell you everything, can I? I'm not going to let you help my brother win."

"Why does Jacob think I'd ever help him?"

"Why do I think you'd ever help _me?"_

"I don't know why you'd think that. You don't strike me as an optimist, frankly."

The man in black laughed. "You have a point there."

"Why does Jacob think I'd hate myself?"

"Because if you helped him, you'd be killing everyone on the island. And if you don't, people will keep fighting. And many of those who are? They're fighting over _you."_

------ END FLASHBACK ------

"Jacob wants to drown the island," James repeats slowly.

Juliet nods.

He stands abruptly. "You sure you didn't wanna tell me this any earlier? Jesus fucking Christ, Juliet." What the fuck was the point of her not telling him this before? So she's been carrying this burden with her all the time so he could just go about his life relatively calm and untroubled? Not that things were all peaches and sunshine every day but ... Jesus fucking Christ!

"There's no guarantee that he'll do it in a time Jonah and I were living there," she says calmly. "Sit down."

"I ain't sittin' down! What good's sittin' down gonna do?"

"And what's standing going to do?" she replies in a monotone, not looking at him. Her fucking logic, this cool detachment -- it probably kept her alive back there but he just wants to get a fucking rise out of her right now, and Dr. McTwitchy over there's looking back and forth nervously at them like he's watching his damn parents fighting or something.

"James. You knew about Jonah's scar, you know what that sort of thing could mean. That's why we're here now, after all. Sit. Down."

He sits, feeling a little bit like an obedient puppy. When did he end up so whipped, anyway? Fucking Miles mocking him back in Dharmaville all over again. James runs a hand through his hair, tries to control his breathing.

She looks over at him finally. "If it makes you feel any better -- as of the way things stood when I left the island, I know I'm still alive and off the island twenty years from now."

Faraday looks fascinated. "How do you know that?"

"It doesn't matter, I just do."

"Thought you said those people were comin' from _thirty_ years from now?" James challenges her. "Thought you said -- "

"I did. But they weren't supposed to let things slip about the future, but one of them made a mistake. As things stood, we were all right. I just want to make sure we stay all right. And it would be awfully nice to know I'm not going to wake up tomorrow missing an arm or something."

He sighs heavily, rubbing his eyes. He's got a headache starting, should probably have worn his glasses today. Been needing them more and more the past few years, ever since they upgraded him to the damn bifocals.

Faraday hasn't said anything in awhile, looking at them uncomfortably. What's he got to worry about? Faraday's got a firecracker of his own at home, no way Juliet's got James any more in line than Red's got Twitchy. Juliet rests a hand on his arm. "James. Could you maybe take a walk? Let Daniel and I go over a few things?"

What is she still trying to hide from him? He wants to tell her no, NO, he's sure as hell not leaving right now, he wants to know what else there is to know, but then he remembers that night, soon after her return.

_"If something bad were to happen, in the future, would you want to know about it?"_

_"How bad?"_

_She sips her wine. "I'm not sure. Maybe not so bad. Maybe the worst thing possible."_

_"That's a pretty big disparity."_

_"That's what makes it more confusing."_

_"Could I do somethin' about it, or not?"_

_"I don't know."_

_"Then Danny Boy would say somethin' about there bein' too many variables or some shit like that."_

_"I know."_

He decides maybe, maybe he does want to leave after all. He stands, tries to act like he doesn't care, the same cool detachment his wife seems to pull off every damn day, effortlessly. It's not easy. "Have fun, Science Club."

_Maybe not so bad. Maybe the worst thing possible._

What does that even mean?

* * *

Daniel seems to relax a little after James leaves. It's something in the set of his shoulders, maybe, but he seems to sit up a little straighter.

She fixes her gaze on him, and he's still perched on the edge of that worn armchair in this dusty little space. "How much do you think we can change things?"

He crinkles up his face, watching her intently. "What do you mean?"

"My son. My son went back to that island. When he was 34 -- coming from 2042."

"Your son," Dan repeats in astonishment. "Your son goes back to the island as an adult? You met him?"

"Yes. I did. We have to change things. He can't go back. He didn't -- " Her voice cracks. "He was supposed to leave with me. And something must have happened. He didn't make it off, and I don't know if he does. Or did. We have to change it. Make it so he never goes in the first place."

"But he already did," Daniel croaks. "Don't you see, Juliet? Even if we _could_ change it so he didn't go back -- that could change things even more. Maybe that was instrumental in getting you off the island in the first place."

She's already shaking her head. "No -- no. We can't let him go -- "

"I know you're worried, but there's nothing you can do. If time is already unstable on the island, it would be dangerous to deliberately try to change things. It could make things worse. That could be all it takes to make it so you never even got off the island in the first place."

She's in full-on panic mode, can't prevent the angry tears. "Then what's the point of my even coming here?" she demands.

"Juliet, I'm not... some time-travel drive-through service you can visit to solve all your problems," he hedges.

Her head snaps up. "I gave up six years of my life -- six years! -- so you and Charlotte could be alive. Six years, Daniel. Don't sit there and tell me there's nothing to be done. You can't take him away from me."

"Me? Why would I -- "

"It doesn't matter," she says abruptly. "Just -- please, we need to figure this out. Get an endpoint."

"But don't you understand? I'm out of this. I'm retired from all this, it can't take up the rest of my life."

"Well, it's probably going to take up the rest of mine," she hisses. "Enjoy your life, Daniel. Tell Charlotte I said hello."

She slams the door behind her.

* * *

Juliet goes to sleep early that night, too early. She looks dazed, the way she had their first few weeks together. He's tried to be gentle with her all night, taking care of her the way she needs, but it's hard when all he wants to do is kick the wall into fucking pulp. He's sitting at the small table across from the bed, in the dim light of a hotel room lamp on its lowest setting, doing today's newspaper crossword and cursing under his breath. He hears the blankets stir.

"What?" she asks him sleepily.

"16 letters, third one's an e. Clue: 'succeeded the carburetor'."

"Fuel injection," she says, and rolls over.

He writes it in, throws down the pen, kicks off his shoes. He walks to the bed, lies down behind her, smooths her hair over her shoulders. She relaxes against him and he drapes an arm over her hip.

"God, I was such a bitch today," she whispers.

"It's OK, I wasn't exactly at my best neither."

"I slammed the door on Daniel. He doesn't want to help. Why won't he help me?" She tenses again, pushing her shoulder blades together.

"He's scared. Just doesn't wanna jeopardize what he's got. 'Sides, I thought you said he does help you. You said you though he spends the next thirty years working it out."

"But things can change. What if it changes?" She hates feeling powerless as much as he does. But here she is getting pissed, slamming doors. And here he is, practicing cool detachment. If that don't beat all.

"I don't know," he admits.

She rolls over so she's facing him. She looks sad and drained; sometimes it amazes him how quickly they can flip from joy to despair, over and over again. But she smiles at him now, and he'll take it, it's what they've got. A little bit of joy, no kids about ready to bang on the door, no phones about to go off, no sister-in-law two rooms over. And she leans in to kiss him, and he squeezes her closer, the two of them pressed up together in the semi-darkness like nothing's ever going to separate them again.


	57. London

_"We don't know anything. We don't know how to cure a cold or what dogs are thinking. We do terrible things, we make wars, we kill people out of greed. So who are we to say how to love."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

------ FLASHBACK (1925) ------

On the first day of the new year, one of the scientists from the future sat down next to her at the edge of the makeshift playground. She looked away from Jonah when he turned to her conversationally. "Hey, Jules."

She couldn't help giving him a strange look. The science team seemed to steer clear of her most of the time, and the familiarity of a 'Jules' just didn't seem to fit. It even sounded strange in his mouth. She nodded suspiciously. "Hey."

"Uh... So, we're gonna have to make a few changes around here," he said awkwardly.

She tilted her head. "Such as?"

"Well, ah... Truth is, we have a big group coming in this week and we're going to need more space. So we're gonna have to ask you to move back to our... uh... natives' camp. You fit in there just as well as here, anyway."

_I don't fit in anywhere_, she thought. Juliet glanced down at her jeans and hippie sandals. "I should be living in a year that starts with a two -- I think that automatically qualifies me to live here."

"Yeah, but, ah... You already lived over there for four years, right?" He twisted in his seat, looking uncomfortable.

"Yes, and they banished me to the man in black's side," she reminded him. "Richard brought me back and he said I could stay here."

"I'm really sorry, but... This is just the way it's gotta be. Like I said, we've got a big group coming in from the future."

"So you're kicking me out." She fixed her death glare on him, trying to intimidate him, and she could tell it was working by the way he twisted uncomfortably. What the hell was this all about? Why were they so desperate to get her out of their camp? Surely she and Jonah didn't take up all that much space -- they lived in a bunkhouse with four other people! "What's your name again? Frank?"

"Uh, Sam."

"Sam. Sam, I don't even know your name and you're kicking me out?" She was shaking her head now. This was just too fucking much, every time she fucking started over again something else came along to unseat them. They'd been here almost six months and she felt her old unfathomable anger start to take hold under her skin.

"No, no, no, we're not kicking you out, Dr. Ca -- uh -- "

She slapped her palms on either side of her, leaned forward abruptly, getting as close to his face as she could without standing. _"What _did you just call me?"

"Nothing -- I mean, that was who you were, right? Before the island?"

Dr. Carlson? Only for the very first year of her career had she been Dr. Carlson. Then she'd married Edmund, changed her name. This was strange. This was too strange. "Fine," she said. "We'll move."

* * *

They were halfway between the two camps when her mind slowed down, clarified. They couldn't keep doing this, get thrown around between places, trying to put down roots and have things taken apart over and over again. And for what? So she could die here? So he could grow up here, spent his whole pointless life here, too?

They'd forgotten to send her with a guide. They'd gotten so comfortable with her, they'd forgotten Richard's rules, and the black smoke was up on them. She pressed her hands over Jonah's eyes.

_You know, maybe if your people had been a little bit nicer to me, I'd still be on your side._

_Are you implying you were ever on my side. Are you implying you are now._

_I don't know._

_Yes you do._

_I don't want Jacob to win._

_Of course you don't._

_But your side doesn't seem right either._

_Why._

_Because you manipulate the dead. And the living. You trick people._

_We all trick people._

_I want to get off the island. Help us get off the island._

The smoke evaporated.

"No. NO. Come back!" she yelled into the trees.

* * *

The natives' camp had grown larger, too. It had been over a year since they'd last been here. Her hair was past her collarbones now. She'd left her hippie sandals behind, they'd do her no good traipsing through the jungle, but she'd kept the jeans. Fuck it. She wasn't giving up a perfectly good pair of jeans, especially here. Especially now.

Juliet's eyes scanned over the camp, the log cabins, the few made of sawed boards, then more log cabins made of fresh, new wood. The cluster of tents was more like two curved swaths wrapping around the clearing now. She cast her eyes on the place where Nicholas' tent would have been, then looked away.

"You're back." She jumped at the woman's voice and turned around.

"Hi, Dottie."

"Hi. Hi, Jonah, you've gotten big."

Jonah took Juliet's hand, didn't say anything. "Jonah, this is Dottie, do you remember her?"

He shrugged. "A little."

"She helped you get born," Juliet whispered to him, and Dottie smiled at her.

"I heard you might be coming back here," Dottie said. "It's OK. Things happen."

"That they do."

"Richard's not here. You'll probably want to talk to Alice."

Juliet stiffened. This was what she was so afraid of.

_She hesitated in the bushes, she didn't want to get shot, and she was still naked, after all. She waited, very still. She was good at waiting, though, and she was good at being very still. Finally, a woman came out of a cabin near the edge of the village, turned to walk down toward the fires. She was still torn about asking for help. She was not sure who she was, or where, or when. (When?) But she didn't know what else to do. "Hello?" she called out. The woman -- in her twenties, long gold-brown hair -- looked toward her, alarmed. She squinted before her eyes widened with knowledge. "Juliet?" she said. "Yes," Juliet said. Juliet. Yes, that was definitely her name. The woman nodded. "My name's Alice. We heard you might be joining us."_

"About Alice," Dottie was saying. "She's been traveling."

"Richard mentioned."

"She's been traveling for... a few years."

"Oh."

Juliet looked across the clearing, saw Alice's head bent over a notebook. She was sitting in the shade of the kitchen-area canopy. Just the place Juliet had last seen her. Her best friend, her worst enemy, her substitute sister. Who was this woman? Who was Juliet in response? When she'd felt like nothing, felt so malleable she couldn't even move, Alice was there, guiding her, shaping her. Back then she almost couldn't have defined herself here without Alice. It had been fourteen months since Juliet had last seen her. Who were they without each other?

Alice raised her head as Juliet and Jonah approached, and Juliet almost took a step back in surprise.

"Hi, Jules," she said.

"Hi."

"Go on, just ask me."

Alice never had any tact, so she never expected it from anyone else, either. "How... how old are you?"

"Thirty-seven? Thirty-eight? Hard to say really, I was jumping around so much."

"Jesus." Juliet sat down heavily.

Alice raised her hand, a glint of gold in the light. "Tied the knot, too. He's still in London, though."

"You're -- closer to _my_ age," Juliet said in shock. This was Alice? This wasn't her Alice. This was -- everything had changed.

"Oh, now, let's not go _that_ far, love," Alice grinned, and then it was almost as if nothing had changed. Alice cocked her head. "Hey, buddy boy. You got big."

Jonah nodded. "Hi, Alice."

Alice jumped to her feet. "Wait a moment, you two, I saved something for you." She walked back toward her cabin -- what had been her cabin fourteen months ago to Juliet, or eight (nine?) years to Alice.

Juliet closed her eyes. Sometimes this could just get too exhausting. Sorting out what was when, when was what to whom. Or something.

When she opened them, she realized she was looking off into the distance at her own former cabin. There was a strange man sitting outside of it, cleaning guns. It wasn't her cabin anymore, and she felt a strange stab of sadness. She'd lived in that little house longer than anywhere else on this island. Jonah had been born there. She wondered what had happened to the rest of their things, the things she hadn't packed in their satchel that day they'd been kicked out.

Alice returned with a thin white envelope, extended her hand. Juliet took it, untucked the flap, slid out her three photographs -- the two of Jonah as a baby, the one they'd taken together right before the day with the keys. "You saved them," she said in surprise.

Alice nodded. "Thought you might want them back. If you ever came back."

Juliet pressed her fingers to her mouth. "Thank you."

"Besides, thought you'd want to remember our haircut." Alice smirked.

_"You _still have our haircut. What, you can't let go of the past?"

"Number one, love, none of us can let go of the past -- that's why we're living here, isn't it? And number two, sure I still have this haircut, but _I_ make it look_ good."_

Juliet glanced down to make sure Jonah wasn't looking at her, then mouthed, _Bitch._

Alice laughed, her same old laugh like tinkling bells. "By the way, Jules, while I was traveling I finally figured out that blasted e-mail business."

"You're kidding."

"Not kidding. Even have a Gmail account."

"What's... Gmail?"

Alice looked surprised. "Google mail."

"Oh," Juliet murmured.

------ END FLASHBACK ------

"Y'know, this is a little creepy," James says, looking out the hotel window. They're a block and a half away from the Queens Road Cemetery, but their room is high enough to see it. The whole thing is huge, wrapped by a wrought iron fence, crowded with stones anywhere from half a century to a century out, he'd guess, judging from the discoloration, the slenderness, the way some of them lean. "You know about this when you booked this place?"

Juliet flops down on the bed, still drained from Oxford (or, he hopes, from staying up half the night last night for far better reasons). "What, you afraid of ghosts?"

"Yeah. Ghosts, psycho killers and your sister."

Juliet manages to look both remorseful and sarcastic at the same time. How in hell does she do that? "Do I need to remind you that there are as many psycho killers in here as there are people?"

"Never said we were psycho." He falls back on the bed next to her.

"You know, we can probably change rooms if you want. That clerk definitely thought you were cute. You could probably talk her up, flash those dimples."

"Nah, too tired. Dimples are restin' right now." He rolls onto his stomach, throws an arm across her. He can hear how his voice is muffled by the pillow. "This is kinda nice, actually. Maybe we could just spend the next couple years bein' international spies or somethin'. Get the kids shipped to us on major holidays." Yeah, he could probably be OK with that right now. At least until he missed them in an hour or two.

"That paternal instinct you have there? Yeah, real sweet."

He groans. "Jesus, I'm tired. You kept me up half the night there, nympho."

_"Excuse _me? Which one of us woke the other somewhere around 3 a.m. for another round?"

"Whatever, I dunno what you're even talkin' about. Come on, let's just take a nap."

"James, we've only got two days here. You really want to spend half of it sleeping?"

"When you keep me up like that, then yeah." He feels a finger jab into his ribs.

"I'm going to take a walk."

"Y'sure? You don't wanna just stay here, take a nap...?" he turns his head out from the pillow to watch her, reaches out a hand to stroke her hip. Jules looks sorta amused, but he can tell she knows he's not exactly thinking about napping anymore.

"Take your nap, James." Calling his bluff. She's already putting her shoes back on.

_Dammit._

* * *

Juliet sits on damp grass, leaning up against a tree. The white stone is weathered, greening with moss.

_I can't believe you complained about rainy season on the island when this whole country is just one permanent rainy season._

That didn't seem like the exact right place to begin. But there was no beginning, anyway, was there?

_Been visiting a lot of cemeteries on this trip. Not exactly the sign of a stellar vacation, is it?_

Stupid. Dark humor isn't going to solve anything. Especially when she's never going to answer back.

Juliet rewraps the charcoal gray scarf around her neck. A scarf. Juliet had never thought she'd be anywhere she'd need such a thing ever again.

"Oh, Al," she breathes out. _Maybe you got what was coming to you, and maybe you didn't. But what the fuck am I supposed to do now?_


	58. Retired

**Thank you to eyeon for leaving review #500 and also being an amazing beta consultant!**

* * *

_"There was almost nothing to say that the universe hadn't said already."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

Somewhere over the Atlantic Juliet turns Physics of the Impossible face-down on her lap. "I would really like to kick this author in the chest," she says thoughtfully. "Just once."

James looks up from his book. "That's the spirit."

She laughs softly. "I think I quit."

"You mean, quit-quit?"

She shakes her head, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. "I don't know. I don't know what I'm supposed to do. Remember when Rose and Bernard said they were retired? I've been saying that all along, like it's a joke. But then Daniel said it to me. And I just couldn't help thinking, this is _all_ a joke. I never knew what I was doing back there. I just reacted to things. A situation would come up, and if I thought it would help me, I went with it. When I was with Ben, I always had a plan. With the crash survivors -- always had a plan. But back there -- " (_back there, back there,_ she always called the '20s "back there" like it was something in the rearview mirror of her car, getting tinier and tinier as she sped away) -- "no matter what I did, nothing ever seemed to help."

"You think it's because you weren't supposed to be there?"

"What do you mean?"

"That's what you said to Dan. You weren't supposed to be there -- you hadn't always been there. Maybe that's why you couldn't really do nothin' except what they wanted to trick you into doin'."

She sighs. Why does he have to be so freaking smart and frustrating all at once? "I don't think that's exactly it. But I think I'm going back to reading Neil Gaiman."

"Fair 'nough." He sticks his nose back in his book. _Why is he smirking like that?_

She pulls her bag out from underneath the seat in front of her, finds Neverwhere and flips it open. After a few minutes, she slaps it down, open-faced, on top of Physics of the Impossible. "Ugh," she says under her breath.

"What?"

Juliet takes a long gaze at nothing in particular, then picks up Neverwhere again. "Events were cowards," she reads out loud. "They didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once."

"Truer words have never been written." James winks. "So, don't feel like readin'? We're stuck on a plane. You wanna go over that Liemstal stuff?"

She shakes her head. "I think I'm going to be retired. And stick to that. And next time we fly, I'm just going to buy a magazine at the gate." She attempts a smile. "You want to play cards?"

"Hey now, just 'cause you're outta readin' material..."

------- FLASHBACK (1925) -------

At least this time she had a bathing suit, even if it looked sort of '70s. She ducked under the water and opened her eyes.

_Well well well. It's been quite awhile._

_What do you want from me. I give up. Just tell me to do it already and I will, if you'll do something for me._

_Do you remember yet._

_Remember what. No. Just tell me._

_It doesn't work like that, I'm afraid._

_You want to drown the island. What do you need with me._

_I want you to remember._

_I don't know what you're even talking about._

_Then what do you want, Juliet._

_I want to leave. I saved your life, you owe me. Let me get my son off this island._

_But I NEED you. You're mine._

_I'm NOT yours._

This was enough. She shut her eyes sharply, kicked her way to the surface angrily as if she could be kicking Jacob. Juliet broke the surface to see someone sitting on the beach. Button-down shirt, round glasses, a brown satchel crossed over his body.

It had been nearly six years.

"I _admire_ what you're trying to do, Juliet," Ben called from the shore.

She stared at him with her poker face, as though her heart wasn't thudding hard under the water.

"No, really, I have to admire it. I didn't think you'd end up so _bold_ as to play both sides at once. Trying with either one of them as if you _actually_ think they'd let you go home."

She slowly paddled closer. "Why are you with Jacob's brother?" she asked through clenched teeth. Afraid to hear Ben was serving him only because of the deal he'd cut, to save her life.

"Don't you_ see?_ Jacob played me for years. For thirty years, I did everything because I thought it was what _Jacob_ wanted. And the entire time, I was nothing more than his pawn. Tell me, Juliet, what are you?"

"You know what I am," she told him in a low voice. Her feet touched bottom as she wiped the thin stream of blood from her nose. Thinking about how she used to be so good at fixing broken people, broken cars. Broken everything.

"We saved you, you know. He and I, together."

She stretched from the water, stepped toward him. His eyes widened as she stood over him, dripping in her bathing suit. He didn't try to stand. Just sat and waited to see what she'd do. But he probably hadn't thought she would lunge forward and kick him in the chest as hard as she could. Her bare foot connected flat with his sternum and his eyes bulged.

It was the most satisfying thing she'd felt in years.

As he lay flat on his back gasping for air, she slowly gathered up her clothes. "I didn't need saving," she said expressionlessly, and pulled on her shirt as she walked away.

------- END FLASHBACK ------

In January she drives to the community college, sits through a bunch of placement tests and signs up for courses. She places out of first-year biology, fails the Spanish placement (it's been too long) and, sighing, asks to take the one for Latin instead. She ends up in Bio 201, first-semester physics (she tells herself it's purely recreational), and -- without a lot of forethought -- Human Behavior and Social Environment I. Maybe she'll become a social worker. Maybe she won't.

**

* * *

Saturday, January 12, 2014**

She's working on a 1970 Dodge Challenger during the first snowstorm she's seen since the age of eight, a trio of space heaters surrounding her in a whirring semicircle in the garage. She's trying to figure out why she's irritated at spending the last week of January at Rachel's, it's going to mess with her class schedule and she knows that's absurd because it's not like she won't be able to catch up, or maybe she's just nervous about spending the week staying with her nephew while Rachel and Brian are on their honeymoon. She could have ended up raising that boy, and she loves him, but she barely knows him.

The door from the kitchen is thrown open and she knows by the definitive footsteps it's James; she slips out from under the Challenger. "Hey, you."

James holds up a set of car keys. "Got a little proposition for ya."

"OK?"

"Just sent the boy across the street. Think it's high time you learned to drive in snow."

_There is no way this can end well. _"Oh, you do, do you?"

"Come on, let's see how your lead foot handles the white stuff."

"No way. Clementine's going to learn how to drive in snow before I do."

He steps toward her, standing over her, and lays his foot on the board, slides her out the rest of the way. "Aw, come on. It'll be fun."

"That's your idea of fun these days? Come on, I can think of a million better ways to spend time together when Jonah's out of the house."

He pauses, considering, and she smirks. She suspects she's got him now.

"You're deflectin'. Tell ya what. You've really gotta learn, otherwise you ain't gonna get around this winter when you need to. Fifteen-minute lesson, then we can do anything you wanna do."

She arches an eyebrow. "...Anything?"

"Yeah, you're definitely deflectin'. Come on, get your mittens on."

"I don't wear... _mittens."_

* * *

They take the Jeep because it's an automatic. "Jus' keep it in Low when we're goin' down the hill. 'Sides, you're the professional, right?" He gives her an over-confident grin.

She laughs nervously, tilting her head. The defroster's blowing a million miles an hour and the wipers are on low, but really the snow's not that bad. "I think I take that back now."

"Well, supposedly drivin' stick's easier in the snow once you know what you're doin', but we'll just keep it simple for now. Now if you're goin' into a skid, steer with it, not against it, OK?"

"Couldn't I just stay home if there's even a chance of going into a skid?"

"Hey, six more years, we move to Miami, right? Jus' humor me."

She's tapping the brakes a little more than she needs to. "If I survive that long," she says wryly, but his breath catches in his throat and she jerks her head sideways, guilty. "I just meant... driving... in the snow."

Shit, why did he have to go reacting like that? He squeezes her right hand and she squeezes back. "Ya know, you really should keep both hands on the wheel in this weather, Jules."

She sticks her tongue out at him and puts her right hand back on the wheel.

They're nearly down the hill when he feels the Jeep shimmy. "K, ease off on the brake, steer with it..."

Jules purses her lips and does what he tells her, and they straighten out. He feels the wheels catch and she lets out a breath. "Actually, I think I'm just going to become a hermit until spring. Thanks anyway, James."

"Nah, you're doin' good. Can you imagine doin' this in one of those Dharma vans?"

She laughs. "No anti-lock brakes on the island, that's for sure. OK, so if I need to just steer with it, how long do I wait?"

"You can feel it, you'll know when it's time."

She pauses, the expression on her face frozen. Her foot eases off the gas. "What'd you say?"

"I said you can just feel it. You'll know when it's time."

She swallows heavily, and is she breathing faster all of a sudden? The expression on her face transforms into something utterly unreadable, but he can detect a thin layer of confusion on the surface, and the Jeep slows down more until she shifts into park.

"Do you think you could drive home?" she asks shakily.


	59. Living Room Wakeup Call

_"This is a well-known tip, a kitchen trick, a bang to loosen the lid. It's not witchery or black magic, it's simply a way to release pressure under the lid. She banged it too hard, and the jar broke."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

James traces the curve of her hip with his fingertips, and she still has her eyes closed, but he sees the shadow of a satisfied smirk cross over her lips, and she snuggles closer to him on the couch. It's still sort of snowing outside and he knows they should get dressed soon, Allison would probably be calling them soon enough to come get Jonah but... _damn_. He could get used to snowy afternoons like this.

Had it really only been half an hour ago that he'd driven them back up the hill and she was still and quiet in the seat next to him? Quiet and still -- ha. That is, until he'd shut the front door behind them and then suddenly she was all over him, pushing him against the wall, pulling off his jacket, unbuckling his belt. He kissed her back as hard as she was kissing him, teeth scraping against lips, grinding his hips against her, sliding his hand up under her three layers of clothing.

They'd paused to trip out of their shoes and she'd tugged the front curtains closed. Good thing, since they'd only made it as far as the couch before he'd finished stripping her clothes off, and she'd bitten her lower lip and bent over the couch, reaching a hand behind her to grab onto his hip, coaxing him forward. The whole thing was rushed and desperate and fucking hot as hell, and he'd started to make a joke about how much she must have enjoyed the driving lesson but somehow he wasn't quite able to articulate the thought, especially with the sounds she was making at the time. So instead he'd focused on sucking on her neck and that had seemed like a far better use of his time.

Now he sorta wants to ask what the hell _that_ was all about, but then, he sorta doesn't, either. So instead he asks something entirely different. "Think any of my swimmers are hittin' the pool deck right about now?"

She opens one eyelid, then the other. "That's disgusting."

"What? Didn't you used to do that sorta thing for a _livin'?"_

She rolls her eyes, stretching, and reaches for the blanket that had been draped over the back of the couch, spreads it over them. "Not ovulating, James. This was purely recreational."

"Well, I enjoy your concept of recreation, then."

"Beats driving in the snow, doesn't it?" She smiles and closes her eyes again, and he pulls her tighter against him.

This whole crazy thing had started early in December when he'd come home to Allison from across the street in the kitchen with Juliet. Allison's son Ryan was orchestrating another one of those epic Transformers battles with Jonah in the basement, and Juliet and Allison were in the kitchen sharing a pot of tea. Juliet was holding Allison's baby and he'd done a double-take at that, she looked like a natural, but then sometimes he still forgot that once upon a time, Jonah had been a baby, too. He'd missed all that, after all. (Sometimes she reminded him about the cloth diapers and lack of washing machines and told him he should be glad.)

But when she'd handed the baby back, she'd looked sort of... What was it, exactly? _Wistful_, he'd realized. _Oh, SHIT, _was his next thought. Frankly, the baby thing hadn't even occurred to him. They were in their _forties_, for Christ sake's, and they already had two kids between them, she was on the pill, the college tuitions they had already staring them in the face were gonna be out of control, end of story.

Having a baby? It was not a good idea. Hell, it was a really, really _bad_ idea. Not to mention she was still obviously in denial about being "retired" from island business. No wonder she hadn't ever said anything about it.

And he told himself he wasn't going to say a word about it. But all that evening, he just couldn't get past that look in her eyes. She just... never let herself _want_ anything, maybe that was it.

That night she'd come downstairs after putting Jonah to bed and just like that, he'd dumped the latest David Sedaris book on the coffee table. Her eyes lit up. "Ooh, are you done with that yet?" She reached for it and he'd swatted her hand away.

"Wait your turn," he growled. "Still got another 60 pages." She huffed in disappointment and turned toward the kitchen. "Wait a sec," he said.

She turned, watching him expectantly.

"You want another one, don't you?"

Juliet crinkled up her nose, confused. "Another Sedaris? No, it's OK, I can wait. You just said you've only got another 60 pages, you'll be finished by tomorrow at the latest."

"Not another damn book," he said impatiently. "Another kid."

Her face had frozen. "That... would be a really, really bad idea."

"That ain't what I asked you."

"Uh... There's no guarantee I would be able to. In fact, I probably couldn't. There's only about a five percent chance in any given month for someone my age..." And she started in about declining fertility rates, and being over 40, and treatments she wouldn't want to go through because she'd put women through that rigamarole a million times during her career and she saw how miserable it made them during the process, despite the times when there were good results, and blah blah blah blah blah.

Who did she seriously think she was fooling? He leaned back, put his feet up on the coffee table, ignoring the wince of disapproval she gave him because he was still wearing his shoes. "And again, that ain't what I asked ya." She started to speak again, but he interrupted. "And don't start talking about how we don't have enough room or some shit like that."

"Do you honestly think it would be a good idea?" she asked him.

"Honestly, no, but I done way stupider shit in my life."

Finally the mask faltered, and she allowed him a small grin. "I've thought about it," she said guardedly.

"And?"

She'd hesitated. "And look what happened last time, I got blasted back 50 years in time."

"I'm guessin' that probably won't happen this time."

She crossed the room, sat next to him on the couch. "Honestly, James, it probably won't work. We got Jonah on the first month, but that was on the island, you know about fertility rates there, and I was younger and -- "

"You done yet?" he interrupted her roughly.

She just glared at him.

"So what's the absolute worst that could happen?" he pointed out. "We save some money at the pharmacy every month?"

She brushed a finger over the back of his hand, not looking at him. "Do... Do _you_ want to?"

Did he want to? He actually hadn't even thought about it, about what _he_ wanted. His eyes traced the hint of a smile on her face, those big blue eyes angled away from him. She looked so nervous, and he didn't even know what he felt, really. Did he want to? He wanted to give her what she wanted, he wanted her to be happy in all of this, whatever the hell it was or turned out to be, and he was still half-convinced Faraday would change his mind and help her after all, it was what was supposed to happen, right? But that didn't mean they couldn't have this, too (maybe), right?

Mainly, he thought he wanted to give her what she wanted. But then another thought popped into his head. He already had two kids he loved more than he'd ever even thought would be possible. But he hadn't been there at the beginning for either one of them, had never held one of his babies, none of that, and yet he _still_ couldn't imagine life without either one of those kids, even when they were crabbing and whining in the back seat or he was driving them to sports in the pouring rain to games that unwisely hadn't been canceled. Or dumping too much money into savings accounts for the inevitable college tuitions. Or tripping over muddy sneakers in the hallway.

"Yeah," he'd finally said, although he hadn't realized it until right at that moment. "Yeah, I do."

She'd covered her eyes, embarrassed to be crying. "I love you," she said.

"Huh. That's good, 'cause I love you back."

* * *

Now he watches her, she's just about dozing off on this couch, their bodies warm and pressed up together, and he remembers that awkward night right after she'd returned, and they both thought they'd tricked the other into falling asleep here together. That was half a year ago now.

But what the hell had happened in the car that freaked her out so much? He can't think of anything that should have elicited that reaction out of her, and she'd actually done a damn good job of trying to hide her emotions, but the poker face wasn't always as indecipherable as she'd like to think -- at least to him, anyway. Then again, he can't really complain if her way of ignoring the issue was to jump him in the living room. 'Cause _damn_ that was hot.

He's half-asleep too when she twists and jerks awake, sitting upright and gasping for air. He reaches out a hand to her and she jumps when his fingers touch her skin. "Jules?"

She's staring out straight ahead. "I'm being the -- " She stops, pinches the bridge of her nose.

"Huh?" _I'm being the _what? How would the end of that sentence even make any sense? Maybe that wasn't what she'd said?

Juliet winces and squeezes her eyes closed. "Headache. Just now."

She's_ being the _WHAT? "You need anything?"

"Um. Could you get me my notebooks, please? Both of them?" She keeps her eyes closed, the heel of her hand pressed against the lower part of her forehead, right between her closed-tight eyes.

"Yeah, Jules. You wanna get dressed?"

"Yeah."

He separates the pile on the floor, helps her put her shirt on and she gets dressed the rest of the way. He pulls on his pants and jogs up the stairs. She hasn't touched her notebooks since they'd come back from seeing Faraday.

James shuffles through the clutter of the bottom drawer for her notebooks, the old blue one (finished not even a month after her return), the yellow one (half full). They're both crumpled up against the back of the drawer like she's been trying to ignore them -- which she had been. James fights the old familiar pang of curiosity when he feels the metal spirals of their spines pressing into his palm.

(He tries to shove away that feeling like old papers crinkled up in a desk drawer. But if he's honest with himself, that urge is getting harder to ignore every time.)

James grabs a pencil from the desk (she always likes to write in pencil for some reason, like she could erase what happened to her) and brings it all downstairs to her.

Juliet squints her eyes open, even though the living room is darkened by closed curtains. Hey, at least they hadn't given the entire neighborhood a free show earlier. Juliet draws her knees up to her chest and props the notebooks against her thighs; she opens the old one -- the blue one -- first, and presses her fingers to her lips, reading. She shuffles through a handful of pages and scribbles something in a margin.

Finally she looks up at him, impatiently. "Could you please just go do something?"

"Like what?"

"I don't know, just anything. I'm not a TV channel."

Women. They just love to run hot and cold, don't they? "Any recommendations for what I should be doin', sweetheart?" He doesn't know exactly why he's taunting her, but maybe he's feeling a little irritated at being shut out.

She looks up at him, not playing along. Dead serious. "I think I might have remembered something. When we were driving. But -- I'm not sure exactly what I remember. Like it was all a dream."

"Remembered... something with Jacob?"

"I... I don't know."

So Juliet played and played and played she was retired (and denial's a river in Egypt), she hid the notebooks in a drawer, acted like she didn't give a damn about Faraday when he knows she does -- "What do you want me to do, Jules?" He can't keep the irritation out of his voice.

She presses her lips together for a moment and _there_, that scheming Other peeps out behind the mask of suburban mom. "Go book us some plane tickets to L.A. I'm sick of this, James. We're gonna go ambush Miles."

He feels his face split into a grin that's probably entirely inappropriate given the situation. "You got it, Blondie."


	60. Los Angeles

**If you're so inclined, feel free to check out Chapters 4 and/or 38 again; this chapter references back to both of them, but it's not necessary to have them fresh in your mind.**

_

* * *

"I thought maybe I was trading my life for this."_

- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

Juliet calls Allison to check on Jonah as they pull up to Miles' apartment building in L.A. after dark. James hasn't been to Miles' newest place yet, and turns out Miles lives on a hilly street flanked by palm trees, nicer than the Ghost Whisperer's previous neighborhood, and to be honest, probably nicer than they would have expected. But then again, a business that's half legitimately supernatural and half outright fraud preying on devastated relatives must be fairly lucrative, when you got right down to it.

"Little J OK?" James turns off the car, set the emergency brake. Damn hills. Not that they didn't deal with hills in their neighborhood, though. And then again, at least here in L.A. they were out of the fucking snow for a change.

She just nods, drapes the strap of her bag over her shoulder.

They hadn't called first, hoping the element of surprise would work in their favor, so of course when they get to the building and ring the buzzer for his apartment, there's no answer. "It's after 7," she says uncertainly.

"You really think spiritualists work a 9-5? For all we know he's outta town." James fishes his cell phone out of his pocket.

A trendy-looking couple comes out of the building then, and Juliet watches them out of the corner of her eye as the couple takes the stairs down to the sidewalk. She slips her foot into the doorframe just before the door falls closed, staying very still otherwise. She and James wait until the other couple gets into a car and drives away before she sweeps her leg out and grabs the door.

"That was easy enough," she says. "Let's wait an hour, and if he doesn't show, we'll call him. All right?"

James shrugs. "This is your show."

"Yeah, well, not if I need muscle."

"Like you couldn't take Miles in a fight," he scoffs, and she laughs.

Miles' apartment is on the second floor and they hover around his door for about 20 minutes without talking; Juliet is very still and expressionless (of course) and he's just starting to get seriously impatient when they hear the door open and footsteps coming up the stairs.

Miles has his arm around some chick in a short skirt, and Juliet slides her eyes over to James, amused yet with some approximation of _Ready?_ and he nods his head in one short jerk.

The girl is leaning into Miles, and he's looking at her until she stops short at the sight of them, and Miles half-trips as this chick stops walking with his arm still around her. Miles' eyes bulge slightly and then he sags into even worse posture than usual.

"Hey, Miles," Juliet says sweetly.

"Well, _gosh_, guys, you coulda told me you were in town," Miles responds sarcastically, but his underlying apprehension is painfully obvious.

"Miles?" the chick asks curiously. "Who's this?"

"Uh, these are my _'friends'_" - the tone is undeniably sarcastic at this point - "Jim and, uh..."

"Leah Ford," Juliet supplies in her sweet, soothing tone.

"Yeah, right, Leah," Miles blathers on. "They live in Oregon and it's totally awesome when they just STAY THERE."

There's just the hint of a smile on Juliet's face as she steps forward. She's taller than Miles, who suddenly tries to stand up straight after all, but Juliet's focusing on the girl. "I'm so sorry to interrupt your evening. We just have a bit of business to discuss...?"

"Melissa," she answers, shooting an irritated look to Miles, who's pursing his lips in bitter acquiescence. "Fine, whatever. Bye." She adjusts the purse on her shoulder and stomps down the stairs.

"Call ya later," Miles calls to her retreating form, and he sighs, aggravated, and fiddles with his keys.

"So what happened to Brenna?" Juliet asks, and Miles ignores them both, pushing past them to jam his key into the lock.

The three of them stand in his living room while he flips on the lights. "You here to deliver a pizza, or what?" Miles crosses his arms.

"You wanna ask questions that you already know the answers to?" she replies, and steps up again, close to Miles, too close, inches from his face. Her own is utterly expressionless, her eyes vacant, and dear God, she can really be creepily intimidating when she wants to be.

"Why do you think you really wanna know? You honestly think I can give you answers, and after this you'll be all like, 'Wow, THANKS, Miles! This was awesome; well, we're going to Disneyland now'?"

Juliet glances over her shoulder at James, who steps forward.

"You know we'll make you if we have to, right?" she asks in an oddly polite tone.

Miles sighs heavily, runs a hand through his hair. "Fine. Sit the hell down." They sit on the couch while Miles goes into the kitchen. "You'll wanna be slightly drunk for this. So will I, for that matter. Vodka or Jim Beam?"

They exchange a glance; she'd gotten her period yesterday and it's probably just as well. She's trying to stay away from alcohol in general to be as healthy as possible, but this is So Not The Time to worry about it. Meanwhile, she'd also quit coffee last month, and that was just a terrible week - for everyone in the house. At first he was just grateful that Clementine wasn't there that week... Then he was bummed because he knew Juliet would never have let herself act that cranky in front of Clem... Then he figured out that's why she'd chosen that week in the first place - that she'd decided to enact her caffeine detox plan specifically when Clem wasn't there. What a sneaky needs-to-be-liked-at-all-costs stepmother.

_"Good _vodka?" Juliet calls, moving her eyes in the direction of the clattering coming from the kitchen.

"...No?"

"Jim Beam it is, then."

Miles thumps back to them with the bottle and three short glasses, drops into a chair across from the couch. He pours it out and they kick back a couple fairly quickly without speaking.

* * *

She blinks a couple times and feels like maybe, just maybe, her eyes are a little bit glassy. "So?"

Miles scowls; he's clearly determined to continually register his displeasure with the whole situation. "OK, remember that first time we talked, after you got back?"

She nods, sliding her eyes over to James nervously. She remembers what they talked about, all of it, and if he brings up Jonah now she doesn't know what she'll do.

"Remember how I said L.A. was filled with the walking dead? Well, I was only half kidding."

James shifts nervously next to her, and she rests a hand on his knee. "Go on," she says.

"So maybe about... Oh, I dunno, a few months after Oceanic 815 would have crashed, you know, before we had our memories back - I was out at this bar. There was this totally hot chick next to me, some blonde, and I could tell she dug me. So we're just chatting, you know how it goes, and she gets a little closer so I put my hand on her arm, right? Well, Jesus fucking Christ, next thing I see is her in the middle of some jungle in the rain getting all weepy and lovey-dovey with some Middle Eastern guy. And they see some kid and she starts running after him, and _then_ some other chick just runs up to her and shoots her in the fucking stomach! What the fuck, you know? And she just... You know, just _died_ with her boyfriend holding her out of the mud. Fucked up, you know, here she is thinking no one will ever understand her or believe in her and she just, you know, _dies_. And it didn't make any sense, either - you know, on account of here she was, _chatting me up in this bar._ I'd never seen anything like that - talking to someone who was alive. I started to freak out that maybe I was seeing the future or something."

"So what'd you do?" Juliet asks.

"Oh, you know, I basically said to this chick, 'So, baby, you're super hot, you wanna come back to my place tonight, and BY THE WAY I CAN SEE HOW YOU'RE GONNA DIE!'" He rolls his eyes. "I got the hell outta there, that's what I did!"

"Shannon," James growls, his voice low, his forehead crinkled up. "It was Shannon, wasn't it?"

"Well, I don't remember what she said her name was, but - that guy with her was Sayid, I guess."

"Yeah," he says.

"I mean, I didn't really figure it out 'til after I got all my memories back. But this has happened a bunch of times now. I'll meet someone randomly or I'll just be somewhere, on the street, and I'll literally bump into someone who came back after the reset, and I'll see how they died in that other life. Like Dan and Charlotte? I mean, jeez, I've seen 'em a couple times the past few years, but I don't need to _touch_ them, you know?"

Juliet pours herself another shot and knocks it back. It doesn't even burn anymore, and she's not sure if that's good or bad. Everyone's silent. Might as well just come out with it. "So what you're saying is..."

"Sorry, Juliet, I know you said you didn't get a reset, but... you _did_ die."

She nods, numb, and doesn't look at James. "Jacob's brother saved my life," she hedges.

"I don't know who that is, but if you didn't get a reset... he sure as hell _did_ save your life. He brought you _back_ to life."

_(She couldn't remember what breathing felt like, other than that it felt like knives, but after a moment she realized she couldn't remember what knives were, anyway.)_

_(Was she alive? She wasn't sure. She didn't think so. She closed her eyes.)_

Miles was right, the liquor was a good idea. James is slumped against her and Juliet leans into him. "So what do you see?" she finally manages to ask Miles. Once again she feels this uncomfortable surge of questioning herself, of feeling like some supernatural freak, but then again, she's sitting in the room with a fucking spiritualist, so at least she's not a freak all by herself.

"What?"

"When you touched me. What did you see?"

He shakes his head. "I knew you'd died - but it was so quick, I really didn't get a good look."

She trains her eyes on him, leans forward.

Miles immediately leans away from her in his chair. "Oh, no. No, no, no, no. We are not doing this."

"Miles. I need to know. Please. You know that's why we're here."

"Yeah, _why_ do you need to know?"

"Can you just trust me?" she asks.

James leans forward suddenly, his knees on his elbows, his hands at his temples, his breathing heavy. He's not saying anything, which unsettles her. She touches his wrist, tries to get him to look at her. "James? You all right?"

He looks sideways at her and his face is gray. "Perfect," he mutters.

She focuses on Miles again. "You do realize we'll hold you down if we have to, right?"

Miles rolls his eyes. "Gee, guys, I really hope maybe someday we can all be friends again," he mutters sarcastically.

James struggles to his feet, slumps into another chair. Miles lurches out of his seat and sits next to Juliet. She watches him, making sure to keep the expression on her face neutral. She hates doing this, but she needs to know what he sees, needs to know if there's any way she can fully remember whatever it was that Jacob wanted her to do. Not that she even wanted to help him, really. Just... in theory.

She holds out her hand, and he takes it.

Instantly he devolves into a shiver, hunching down into himself, squeezing his eyes closed, muttering. He wraps his free arm over the top of his head, and she feels completely normal (physically, anyway), nothing out of the ordinary as his grip on her tightens and she notices he's got more gray in his hair than he should, he's only 36.

But eventually she does start thinking back to that time - whether it was seconds or minutes or hours or even days, she didn't know.

_(Nothing but white-hot searing pain, white light all around her, she couldn't see anything, she couldn't draw in a deep breath, broken ribs like bullets under her skin. The sound around her was the loudest thing a brain could possibly comprehend, so loud that it actually sounded silent, like nothing, like a backwards whisper.)_

"...You were coughing up blood," Miles mumbles, "broken ribs... head... injury, concussion maybe, punctured right lung, massive internal injuries, broken bones, James, picking up a rock, then it goes all white for awhile."

She wants to tell him, "Yeah, tell me something I_ didn't _already know." She _knows_ there was unfathomable pain, she recalls the _fact_ of pain, but she doesn't remember the way it felt, not exactly.

He opens his eyes. "So you were thinking about massive internal injuries, and stuff about Jim, and then you saw the bomb and decided, hey, why not smash it with a rock a bunch of times?"

"I know. And?"

_"And...?_ So you did, and then it got really white for awhile, and then you died." He purses his lips, looking displeased.

"No, but - " She's struggling to understand. "What about after?"

"After?"

"Yeah."

"There IS no after. You know that's what I do, right? I can see how people died, and know what they were thinking about, but after that - it's a total crapshoot. Sometimes I can tell whether they've gone on or stuck around. Sometimes I can't. And with you post-bomb people, well..."

"Well, what?"

Miles shrugs and she extends her hand again. His mouth set in a grim line, he takes it, starts twitching and muttering again. Finally he jerks his eyes open, sweat on his upper lip.

"So did I go on?"

"Not... exactly."

Now they were getting somewhere, maybe. James is still strangely silent, although he's pouring himself another drink, not looking at them, and she hates this thing he's been doing lately, trying to act all cool and calm and detached like she does. It's fucking creepy and now she sees how exactly she's managed to intimidate people so easily. One point for (or against?) the early-21st century Others, she supposes.

Juliet belatedly realizes through a slightly drunken haze they're going to have to call a cab to take them back to their hotel, or just crash here if Miles can deal with all the crap they're putting him through right now.

"Not exactly?" she prompts Miles.

Miles looks simultaneously drained and irritated, pours himself another drink. "I don't know. All I can see is the island." He tosses back the shot.

"Listen up, deputy." James finally speaks up. "If you're lyin', I swear to God..."

Miles is shaking his head rapidly. "I'm not lying. You think I want you people showing up at my door again _next_ month, too? Or on assorted federal holidays?"

"What about the island do you see, exactly?" she asks.

"Oh, um, GEE, I don't know. Trees, sand, water?" He rolls his eyes like she'd just asked him the stupidest question in the history of the universe.

"No smoke? Or people?"

"What part of_ 'the island' _do you not understand?"

They lapse into silence and Juliet squeezes her eyes shut, feeling the evening breeze from an open window wash over her face. In these past few weeks of hard winter she's managed to forget what warm air felt like, and it feels only like the island to her. To think she's gotten away, ha. And yet maybe she'll never get away, not really. The fucking island, the man in black, Jacob, in her veins, on her skin, and who really knows anyway, who even wants to know?

* * *

She opens her eyes to early-morning sun in her face, the blinds casting bars across her jeans, a prison on the couch. She rolls over onto her side, remembers they'd ended up staying (passing out, more like it) at Miles' last night. James is sprawled sideways in an armchair, and she vaguely remembers Miles mumbling something about a guest room before he himself had conked out on the floor, but Miles is nowhere to be seen right now and damn, James is going to be sore as hell this morning, and they have a 1 p.m. flight out of here.

Her head hurts in that utterly hungover, utterly non-supernatural way, and that's something, at least Tylenol will do something here, and her throat aches from the dehydration from downing all that crappy Jim Beam and then the even crappier vodka they'd started on after that, none of them saying very much.

She slides off the couch careful not to move her head too much, walks down the hall to the kitchen to get some water. She pauses in the doorway, her hand on the frame, to see Miles red-eyed, his hair rumpled and squashed from sleeping on one side. He looks like shit, probably just about as bad as she looks, and an unexpected sense of guilt floods her. She did this to him, and for what? For nothing.

Miles tilts his chin up, gulping water out of a clear blue glass as he opens the cabinet, finds another glass and fills it for her.

He holds it out, and their fingers don't touch, they both make sure of it.

"I'm sorry," she says softly.

Miles shrugs, his eyes fatigue-ringed and jumpy. "Yeah, well, me too," he says.


	61. Boston

_"We needed time to consider ourselves, to come up with a theory about who we were and set it to music."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

They're insanely good at pretending they're happy.

Which is not to say they aren't.

But she pretends she's happy half-skimming her textbooks while keeping her eyes on ending-soon eBay auctions for old car parts. He pretends he's happy that she's pretending to be happy.

She pretends she doesn't care she was used, held hostage, tricked. He pretends he doesn't care she used to be dead.

James stands over the printer in his tiny office at work, snatches the job listing and folds it, stuffs it in his pocket without reading it over. Emporia State is looking for a librarian, and he likes working at the prison library (would love it if it weren't for the macho-wannabe asshole inmates who sometimes wander through during free time like they own the damn place, interrupting his book club meetings with the guys who actually do care about being there).

But university libraries pay better, even at the state schools, no doubt about it. Anyway, they need the money. Juliet's been talking about going into social work or becoming a physician's assistant, and either one sounds good but it'll be years before she starts making money, and even if she sticks to state schools after she's through with community college, they'll have half of Clem's tuition staring them in the face by the time Juliet's done. And if she gets pregnant there's no way she can keep working on cars.

"We'd have money if I could go back into REI," she said out of the blue the other night, her hands full of books, her voice heavy with regret. At first he thought of the sporting goods store, then remembered from a lifetime ago: reproductive endocrinology and infertility.

He'd enlisted her to organize the basement shelves -- fucking ridiculous how that stuff could get so out of order sometimes, but he brought a lot of stuff into work when he was done, leaving gaps where Jonah would hide Transformers or the ends of sandwiches, and stuff got lost or out of order and sometimes it felt like he was running a damn library for the neighborhood out of his (no, _their_) basement, anyway.

"Yeah, well, we'd have money if I started runnin' cons again, too," he'd retorted, shuffling through her Stephen Kings that were slowly invading the fourth shelf in the corner. He pretty much hated King; only had that copy of Carrie in the first place 'cause of her. "Want me to try finding some miserable desperate woman in a crappy marriage? Show her a good time?"

She'd grinned, he could see the nagging guilt fading, at least for the time being. "Jump into your Delorean, look me up around 1999," she told him. "I really could have used some hot sex around then. And I would have given you at least a few grand, no problem."

Then he'd started teasing her about cheating on her with a younger woman, meaning _her_, and that was pretty much the end of it. ...At least until he started thinking about how much daycare probably costs. _Shit_. OK, so maybe trying to have a baby right now isn't the smartest thing in the world, but they don't have much time to waste.

Besides, he's spent his entire goddamn life waiting for something. Waiting to get revenge on the bastard who caused his parents' deaths. Waiting for Kate to love him. Waiting to get off the island. Waiting for Locke to come back for them. Waiting to get to know his daughter. Waiting to get back to Juliet, and when that failed, waiting for Juliet to ever show up again. He was fucking sick of waiting, wasn't going to do it anymore.

So they'd lapsed into silence for awhile, her stopping to ask him a question every now and then about his cataloging system, which she found impossible to grasp for some reason. And they were pretty much done when again she brought up the suggestion to just have Rachel declare her dead, slip them Juliet Burke's life insurance money and cashed-out 401K, but he just can't let her do that, can't stand the thought. ("Someday we're gonna be out of this and you're gonna be you again," he told her, and she'd just looked away, afraid to hope.)

Anyway, this job listing is at Emporia State, and he'd gone there himself, for the last 60 hours of his Bachelors and then the library program after, and if he's lucky then his program adviser is still working there, can give him the scoop on the job, maybe put in a good word for him.

James heads out of his back office, nods at Anthony who must be bored out of his mind right now over on the reference desk. James shrugs and just starts hauling boxes -- new shipment, hallelujah and amen and don't forget to tip your server, amazing the state ever bothered to increase their damn funding, but they're finally going to have enough copies of Fahrenheit 451 to read in the book club. He knows he could leave the boxes for the inmate employees but he's full of nervous energy, can't get over what Miles told them in L.A. last week, and he digs his fingers into the brown packing tape over the first box and pulls it off with a satisfying rip, thumps the stacks of miraculously new books onto the metal cart.

He'd be disturbing the peace if there were more than two damn people in here, but it's off-hours and only a few guys on the lowest clearance would be free to come in here now, and there's a game on this afternoon anyway, and even Anthony would be watching it if he weren't on the damn schedule.

He waves a copy of Fahrenheit 451 in the air and Anthony gives him a thumbs-down. Dickhead. Anthony had suggested having them read Of Mice and Men in the book club next, since they already had enough copies. Yeah, sure, once upon a time that had been James' favorite, but of course now it only brought him right back to Ol' Bug Eyes and that mindfuck of a hike to the top of Hydra Island, and James shot that suggestion down in about five seconds flat.

* * *

James comes home to find Juliet's Outback at the curb and the garage open, empty. He makes a little impressed noise, parks in the garage for a damn change, goes into the house through the kitchen.

Juliet's at the table, one leg propped up on the chair so her knee's up near her chin. She's skimming her Human Behavior text with a yellow highlighter, gives him a big smile when she hears him come in. "Hey you," she says, tilting her chin up so he can kiss her.

"Found any breakthroughs yet?"

She shakes her head. "I'll be sure to let you know."

He pretends to pat her arm sympathetically. "Someday we'll figure out what made you the way you are, I promise."

Juliet laughs and swats at his arm.

"Offspring check?"

"Uh, Clem's up in her room, and before you ask me, slavedriver, she already did her clarinet practice. Jonah's in the living room."

Sounds good. He ambles through the door, sees Little J sprawled out on his stomach, reading Where the Wild Things Are and absentmindedly running a Matchbox car over Cat's tail. Cat's ridiculously patient with everyone in the house except Juliet, which to James is basically the most hilarious thing ever. "Hey, kiddo."

"Hi, Dad." Jonah looks up, props his chin onto his fist. "Hey... Dad? Do you think Cat is a Wild Thing?"

"I dunno, she don't look too wild right now."

"Oh." The kid looks disappointed, curling his mouth up at the ends and furrowing his brow. A-fucking-mazing sometimes how the kid could do Juliet's lip thing and his forehead thing all at once. "Dad?"

"Yeah?"

"Do you think the island is where the wild things are?"

------ FLASHFORWARD (2041) ------

Joe turns around the bend and slams on his brakes, cursing. He leans on the horn, rolls down the passenger side window. "Hey!" he bellows.

His mother turns around and breaks into a grin. "Hey yourself," she retorts. "You always try to run down old ladies in the street?"

"That depends. You always like to play in traffic?" He clicks the unlock button.

She rolls her eyes and opens the door. "No sidewalks with all this damn snow," she says, but leans over to give him a hug. "Well, you're here early."

"Yeah, got finished early, thought I'd come up here and surprise you guys." He shifts the truck back into gear, heads toward the house.

She pulls off her hat, shakes out her hair until it falls just above her shoulders. "Well, Dad and Eva are at the Bruins game with Uncle Brian, so it looks like I'll have you all to myself for a bit."

"Wait a sec, Eva's in town?"

"Yeah," she says, clearly surprised. "You didn't know? She said she was coming here to talk to_ you."_

"Talk to me about what?"

His mother's face goes expressionless. "Oh, well, you know your sister. She didn't say." She pulls off her gloves, holds her hands in front of the dashboard heater.

"But you know anyway, don't you?" Having a mother who knew the future more often than not wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Not by a long shot. Sure, sometimes it could be hilarious, but it could also be scary and annoying.

She shrugs casually. "Maybe. I've got bigger things to worry about right now. The publishers sent back the latest round of edits, and your father just about hit the roof last night. He says after this long they should accept the fact that he knows what he's doing."

"And did you look at the edits?"

"Yeah."

"And?"

"And? And the publishers are idiots. This is the last book on that contract, though. He's definitely going elsewhere after all the junk they're trying to pull. Charlene's already working on something with Doubleday."

"Well, good, then."

"So what's with the haircut? Aren't you cold?" A loaded question if he'd ever heard one. She can be soooo sneaky when she wants to be. Changes the subject away from herself, then craftily directs the heat straight back to him. He hates when she does this.

But almost involuntarily, Joe runs his hair over his head, the bristles of his close-cropped hair. He'd been letting his hair grow long the past few years. But she must have already seen this haircut on him, knows what his getting it must mean. "Nah, see, they make these things called hats..."

She picks up his brown wool hat from the floor of the truck, holds it up with an eyebrow arched. He grabs it from her and acts like he's about to put it on, then tosses it over his shoulder.

"It's a shame your father raised to you to act so immature," she manages to say with a straight face.

* * *

Joe pulls up to the house; she jumps out of her side of the truck with surprising agility, pulls out a set of keys, starts her ritual of unlocking the side door. Three damn locks including the deadbolt, and then she's punching in the code on the alarm system, nods at him over her shoulder.

They enter through the kitchen to find Cat Three curled up in a ball on the table. "Three!" she yelps. "Get off the table!" Three blinks open one yellow eye, then yawns and closes it again. "He only ever listens to your father," she complains, and steps toward the table, her arms outstretched.

"Hey!" Joe tries. "Get down, Three." Three opens his eyes and slinks sulkily off the table; Joe smirks at his mother, who glares at him.

"All right, fine, you made your point," she says, still glaring a little, but her lips twitch. "So you wanna tell me what this visit is all about?" They unzip their jackets, toss them onto the chair by the door.

"I don't know, you wanna tell me you're still pretending like you don't know?"

She sags visibly then, sinks into a chair. He steps over to the counter to put on some coffee to mollify her with, pausing at the hunk of greasy metal resting on a plastic sheet. He studies it as he pops the coffee pod into the machine. "All right, I give up. What the hell is that?"

His mother swivels around and shrugs nonchalantly. "Dishwasher motor."

"Right, of course." He crosses his arms. "Look, I know your feelings on the subject, but we've got it all worked out. They've already started going."

She looks at him for a long moment, her lips pressed into a thin line. "Daniel called me last week."

"It'll be OK, Ma." Stupid of him to be telling her it'll be OK. He knows the science, but _she_ knows what happens; it's all already happened for her. But in the grand scheme of things, it's only half-happened. The loop needs to be closed, one way or another.

She shakes her head. "Like you really know."

"I know more than you'd think."

"Well, that part is true. Or at least, it will be. You blew my mind when you showed up on that beach. You knew... well, it seemed like you just knew everything."

"So you gonna fill me in now? There's a lot of pieces I still don't know."

She pretends to mull this over. "I guess we have a couple of hours until the game is over." For most of his life he's wondered what she knows and what she doesn't, what she knew of him as an adult, a scientist, her grown son. Now all those things that had happened to her would happen to him now, and it would be amazing if it weren't fucking terrifying. "Hey, have you been going to the shooting range lately?" she asks suddenly.

"Uh... I've been really busy and... it's just kinda creepy."

His mother winces. "Figures," she says under her breath.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

Her eyes go huge and innocent. "Nothing."

"Yeah, right."

"I'm sorry about Carolyn, by the way."

"You knew all along, didn't you?"

She nods. "I hope it can still work out, though."

"You don't know?"

His mother shakes her head. "After this year, I won't know anything else. For the first time in decades. And you know what?" She cracks a grin. "I'm kind of looking forward to that." She pauses, thinking, then stands. "Coffee's almost ready. Pour me some, would you? I'll be right back."

He listens to the clatter of her hiking boots on the wooden floor as she heads to the back of the house, her little office under the stairs. He pours the coffee but keeps his ears perked; he hears her unlocking and then rummaging through some filing cabinets. He grabs the soy milk from the fridge -- he's finally convinced her to go vegan, but Dad's a lost cause for sure -- and studies the latest pictures of Clem's girls stuck on the refrigerator door.

Joe's already drinking his own coffee when she comes back carrying a stack of old notebooks topped off by a small, flat white plastic box. She dumps the pile on the kitchen table, takes a sip of coffee. "Thanks, buddy. Hey..." She tilts her head, curious. "Did you leave the letter yet?"

He jerks his head up, alarmed. "How did you...?"

His mother appears to be halfway between sympathetic and amused as all hell. She just arches an eyebrow.

He realizes, then. Again. Again and again and again. "Right," he mutters.

"Did you?"

"Next week."

"All right, good luck with that, but it should go smoothly. Before I forget, do me a big favor?" She holds out the white plastic box. "Bring this to the island with you, please?"

He takes it from her, his curiosity going into overdrive. "What's in it?" he asks.

She shrugs. "It's a suture kit."

------ END FLASHFORWARD ------


	62. Everything's Wrong

_"My feeling then was that I had drunk too much orange juice, and the acid was destroying my stomach and maybe the rest of me, too."_

- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

When James comes into the bedroom he finds Juliet sitting up in bed with a book in her lap that she's clearly not reading. "Wall that fascinatin'?" he asks.

She raises her head. "Huh?"

He points to her book, and then the wall, and then back at her book.

"Oh."

He sits down on his side of the bed, facing away from her, and bends down to untie his shoes. Giving her time to talk without him watching her. He can feel her eyes on his back, hears the silence as she weighs each of her anticipated words individually. "I'm scared to stay at Rachel's house by myself."

Of everything he could have expected her to say, that wasn't something that had really crossed his mind. He swivels around to face her. "Julian's gonna be there," he points out uncertainly, like a twelve-year-old boy could defend her from God-only-knows-what.

She looks sheepish. "Yeah. I know. I mean, I know it's silly."

"Well, maybe I could get that week off," he says. It comes out sounding more uncertain than he means it to.

She's shaking her head, anyway. "You've already missed an awful lot of work since I showed up here. And anyway, Jonah shouldn't miss any more school."

"You talked to Rachel, see if there's someone else who could stay with him?"

"No... She's got enough to deal with right now with the wedding. I'd completely freak her out if I told her out of the blue I couldn't do it. She'd probably say I was trying to wreck her honeymoon or something."

"I bet she'd understand."

Juliet laughs a single note. "Oh, she would not."

"Yeah, well... She might."

"It's just - I don't think I've been the only adult in a house overnight in the real world since... Well, you know."

"That the only reason?"

She pauses a long time, almost too long. Then: "No."

"You got a fake name for a reason."

"Exactly." Juliet chews on a fingernail. She's been doing that a lot lately; he looks at her hand and realizes her nails are chewed down about as far as they can go. A by-product of quitting caffeine maybe, or something else. "I know there's a good chance no one will ever come looking for me. But the way things were going with time travel..." She shrugs. "Jacob's brother's side wants me dead. They couldn't kill me for years, and when they finally could have, Richard got me the hell out of there." Juliet offers him a wry grin. "Funny how Jacob's brother can bring me back to life and then come to so thoroughly regret it."

"Yeah. Hilarious," he spits out through teeth so tightly clenched he thinks he'll give himself a headache in another minute. Juliet deals with this shit by pretending none of it's real, ignoring it until she parcels out another fact, and another, here and there every now and then like she's telling him the fucking mail just arrived. And he's scared, sometimes he's scared out of his fucking skull, wondering when he parks outside the house if he'll come home to something horrible even though she already told him she's supposed to still be alive in 20 years. But then he realizes: She's just admitted something for maybe the first time to him.

She's scared, too.

- FLASHBACK (1925) -

Juliet half-dragged, half-carried Alice back to their camp, a makeshift tourniquet tied tightly around Alice's arm. In Juliet's other hand she managed to carry a torch, which helped when a man (George?) on the edge of their camp jumped forward and scooped up Alice. "Oh God, is she OK?"

"Just perfect," Alice mumbled.

"She'll be all right, it's just a graze. She's lost a lot of blood but I'll get her back to normal," Juliet told him.

"Are you sure?" he asked anxiously. "Because if not..."

"If not, what?" Juliet challenged him. "Come on, just help me get her inside."

They got Alice up on the table and in weak lantern light Juliet started to disinfect the wound. Alice hissed through her teeth, which Juliet took as a good sign.

"What the hell were you two doing out there?" George demanded.

Juliet just rolled her eyes. "Girls' night out."

Things had been different since she'd come back to this camp; they expected her to fight now. Really fight, not just shoot people while she hid in bushes or trees. And she had been, for months. They brought her into redone battles, she pulled triggers over and over. Arteries spurted, bodies fell, faces contorted in shock and surprise. And nothing could fucking touch her; it was a miracle in the sickest of ways. Guns jammed, arrows missed, knives were dropped by suddenly slippery fingers. Once when she was time-traveling, she saw another version of herself on the other side - dazed, her face blank, and she realized it was one of those times, years ago, when the man in black had been controlling her.

(It took a surprising amount of strength to not try to shoot herself.)

And then, just a few weeks ago during some altercation, some man had grabbed her by the hair and just hauled off and punched her in the fucking face; she'd hit him back, _hard_, laughing hysterically. The laughter was what had shocked him more than anything, giving her just enough time to pull the gun from the back of her pants and put a bullet through the center of his forehead. She was still laughing long after he'd hit the ground. That night while she waited for sleep she tried to figure out why getting a black eye from a soon-to-be-dead man had felt better than she could possibly have imagined, and she'd decided she didn't want to know.

But she'd almost had enough of it all, feeling so fucking evil and inhuman, which was why she'd gone to see Jacob last week. Of course, now he was even more unwilling to loosen his metaphorical grasp on her, and then she'd gotten to see Ben. Oh, joy. Not that kicking him in the fucking chest wasn't incredibly satisfying, even better than getting punched in the face.

(It was really sick what she was enjoying these days.)

Now as she cleaned Alice's wound and started to stitch her up, she wondered once again if this was really all there was, would ever be. She'd told herself all she wanted was to go home. But if she'd felt ill-prepared for the real world sitting on that sub in 1977, that was nothing compared to now.

For so long she'd worried she would never get home. And now she was starting to realize there _was_ no home out there. This was her home. She'd never fit in in the real world again, no matter what she asked Jacob for. She'd be in battles and she'd laugh. Alice had someone teaching Juliet to shoot arrows; just yesterday she'd hit the bull's eye dead-on nearly every time. Hey, maybe someday she'd light a few on fire and shoot up the survivors of Oceanic 815. Nothing really mattered anymore, so she did what they wanted.

There was a man in this camp now who seemed to have a thing for her, would smile at her, try to chat with her, but she was out of that sort of thing. Nothing good had ever come for her in that realm, or if it had, it hadn't lasted long. It didn't really matter; nothing did.

Alice was babbling a little incoherently and Juliet worried about the blood loss Alice had suffered; it shouldn't be a problem in the long run but it was scary to see right now. Suddenly Alice tried to roll over on the table and - "Hey, George - grab her, will you?"

George grabbed Alice's left hand and right forearm, trying to keep her from rolling off the table.

Juliet hadn't wanted to knock Alice out, it could be dangerous with the blood loss, but she hustled over to her cabinet anyway, found the ether and a clean rag, held the soaked cloth under her nose for a moment until she went limp.

She stitched up Alice's wound in silence, George holding the lantern for her, wondering if the next time they won't be so lucky, or maybe they would.

* * *

Juliet came out of the cabin to wash her hands and find clean clothes. Richard was sitting out by the fire, his features illuminated by the flames. His eyes widened when he saw her. True, she had a ridiculous amount of blood on her, especially considering none of it was her own, and only some of it was Alice's.

"How is she?"

"She'll be all right in a few days."

Richard nodded, his face unreadable.

"I wish I had never drunk your orange juice." The words slip out before she knows she's saying them.

"I'm still going to give it to you anyway, you know."

"I know."

- END FLASHBACK -


	63. The Beginning of the End

_"I really did not feel okay about any of this, and there was really nothing I could do about any of it."_

- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

The realization hits him like a ton of bricks. "Juliet," he says hoarsely, grabbing her hand.

She turns her head up, confused by the fear overtaking his face. "What is it?"

"Don't - don't stay at Rachel's by yourself. I'll stay with you. Me and Jonah, we both will. It's easier for him to miss school than Julian."

"What...? Why?"

James swallows hard. "Someone broke into the house. I just remembered. About a year and a half ago, someone broke into the house. When I was at work."

"What? Someone... broke into the house? Wait a - you just remembered it? Like a new memory?"

He's shaking his head. "No, no - no, I mean, there ain't another memory underneath it where I didn't have that happen, that's what you're askin', right?"

"Yeah."

"OK, no, this always happened, it just wasn't a real big deal after the fact, so I sorta forgot about it."

"What happened? James?"

"Someone broke in through the kitchen. You know, broke one of them little panes of glass on the back door, let themselves in. Didn't take nothin', that's why it was kinda weird. Just... They wrote somethin' on the basement door."

"What?" Juliet's twisting up her face in confusion. "What'd they write?"

"A bunch of numbers."

"Numbers? Like Hugo's numbers?"

"Yeah. I mean, they weren't Hugo's numbers - well, I think it had one of them in it, but it was just a string of 'em, with a whole bunch of ones."

"Ones...?"

"Yeah. I dunno."

"What was the number? Hugo's number?"

"Shit... I can't remember. Got the police report somewhere around here, saved it just in case. They've gotta have the whole thing in there. You don't think - you don't think it was someone from the island...?" He asks her this like it's not exactly what he's thinking now.

"I never know what I think anymore," she says. "I'm going to go check on Jonah."

- FLASHBACK (1925) -

Richard helped Juliet move Alice back to her own cabin, and Juliet sat with her more than half the night, watching the moonlight move across the floor. Alice kept mumbling about the island. When she'd been quiet for a solid hour, breathing deeply, Juliet smoothed her hand over Alice's forehead, went back to her own place to get some sleep.

In the morning she found Alice's bed empty.

She shook out the sheets, checking for blood, but there was just a small smear up near where Alice's bandaged arm would have been. Jonah was standing in the door, watching her uncertainly. "Where'd she go, Mama?"

"I don't know, buddy. Come with me, all right?" She took his hand and they doubled back to the cabin they shared with Dottie these days, checking there in case they'd merely crossed paths. She checked the communal kitchen area, asked Dottie, George, whoever they saw. No one knew, and Juliet was starting to worry. Alice had been shot the night before. Sure, it had had been only a graze, not serious in the long run. But who just walks off in the middle of the night, into the jungle, with a healing bullet wound? Even in a place where people healed quickly?

She asked Dottie to watch Jonah, then walked off alone. She circled the long way around to the arsenal, removed the key from her neck, which for almost two years now had hung on an extra-long cord to keep out of sight. The extra key. The fifth key. The one she'd told Richard she'd thrown into the ocean.

_Others can play tricks, you know._

She got herself a rifle, hiked through the jungle, searching for the prints of Alice's narrow, tiny feet. Tracking the way Christopher had taught her before he'd died. But she found nothing, no footprints, no signs. She searched all day, went back to the arsenal at dusk, put the rifle back.

A day went by. Two days. A week. She searched for eight days before she gave up.

People left Juliet alone. No one had ever made her go fight except Alice and Richard. Juliet didn't know what to do with herself.

Two weeks. Three weeks. A month.

Juliet sat on the floor of Alice's cabin, watching the dust filtering through the air. "Alice?" she asked in the silence. The silence didn't answer.

Two months. Three.

* * *

"Juliet, I think it's time we got you some fake IDs and got you two out of here," Richard was saying. "I can show you how to get back to your time. There's going to be something that happens here, it's happening soon, and you're going to need to get out the day that happens. You're not supposed to be here for it."

"Supposed to?" she burst out dryly, before she could help herself. "Because as I recall, there have been a whole _lot_ of things I wasn't supposed to do, and I did them all." She clenched her jaw, bitter, not blinking. She wasn't looking at him.

"You want to pick your name, or should I just see what we can get?" he said.

"Leah," she said, and the name caught in her throat. She didn't believe him. She wasn't going home.

"Good choice," he said. Leah, the sister of Rachel in the bible. "You're going to have to be careful if you see her again, you know. She can't go to the authorities."

"I know that."

"What about a name for him?"

"You don't need to change his name. No one will be looking for him." She felt like this was the longest conversation she'd had in years.

"True. All right, well, I'll see what I can do. Driver's license, birth certificates, bank account, credit card and cell phone. You're going to come out in Tunisia," he warned.

Credit card? Cell phone? Those phrases had almost no meaning to her anymore. "Fine. I don't care. Just do it if you're going to do it." Yeah, right. She'd believe it when she saw it.

There was no way in hell she was leaving this island. It was never going to happen. She'd already gotten over it, or so she thought, and she was angry with Richard for trying to give her false hope. (And if they did go? How would she ever live with herself in the real world, after everything she'd done here?) _Please don't let it be true,_ she thought. _I can't leave here. I can't._

- END FLASHBACK -

Juliet opens the door to Jonah's room, checks the locks on his windows. They're latched. She looks at the yard below, empty.

Circling back to the bed, she brushes her hand over Jonah's cheek. His skin is warm and smooth, his breathing even. She bends to kiss his forehead, squeezing her eyes closed at the contact. _Please grow up to be happy,_ she thinks before she realizes it.

- FLASHFORWARD (1925) -

Joe watches from a distance. His mother has told him this is how it would happen, right after Alpert talked to her on the beach, and the date in Faraday's green notebook confirmed it. She had told him what he could try to change, what he shouldn't, what would probably only make things worse. And she'd stressed it had to be today he came - the date written in Faraday's green notebook, the one from his mother, half-filled with her own handwriting, none of it dated past November 2013.

(And somewhere nearby, right now, he is five years old.)

Across the beach, Alpert braces his hands on his knees, stands and nods at Joe's mother, who barely acknowledges his departure. Joe stays where he is for a good long while, watching her. She's just sitting there, so still; her eyes are closed. And he keeps trying and failing to gather up his courage. _(This is incredibly fucking weird.) _Finally he stands on shaky legs, crosses the sand.

God, she looks young. And sad. Here goes nothing. "Juliet?"

His mother opens her eyes and looks up, squinting in the late afternoon sun. She half-shakes her head; she doesn't recognize him. And then she does, her face opening with hope and fear.  
"Son of a BITCH!" she gasps, her stillness evaporating instantly. She scrambles backward across the sand on her hands and heels.

(His mother had told him she'd say that, and they'd laughed.) "I wouldn't say that if I were you," he says, and laughs again now.

"What. The HELL are you doing here?" she demands.

"Jeez, what a greeting." He flops down on the sand next to her and smiles at her, trying to keep it casual, like his heart isn't going a million miles a minute. Weirdly enough, he finds himself anxious to make sure she'll like him, this version of himself so different from the quiet little boy who'd clutched desperately at her hand in the Tunis-Carthage International Airport on July 3, 2013. "I come all this way, and that's the best you can do?"

She manages half a grin, still shaking her head in disbelief. "Yeah, well, I think my heart just exploded, buddy."

"Oh, get over it," he says, smirking. "On the bright side - I'm absolutely _positive_ you'll live, Ma." Her smile fades. He can see her thinking, _And will you?_ For some reason he thinks, then, of that fucking insane fight between his parents, that first winter in Oregon. Jesus, that fight had scared the living daylights out of him.

He stands, offering her his hand to pull her up. "Why don't you go introduce me to that kid of yours?"

So he helps her up, but she's still staring intently at his face. "Did I ever tell you that Alice named you?" his mother asks. A non sequitur if he's ever heard one.

"Yeah," he manages.

She searches his face anxiously. "Do you know what happened to her?" she asks.

- END FLASHFORWARD -

James is ripping through the contents of the desk, he knows he's gotta have the damn thing here somewhere, and it's not in the first two drawers, so he yanks the bottom one hard, drags it out of the tracks. On top are Juliet's notebooks, blue and yellow, and his heart drops into his stomach, he wants to look so badly, the desire is almost palpable, but he just can't do that, can't betray her trust that way, she's left them here in this drawer because she trusts him not to look. (...Unless she's left them here in this drawer because she _wants_ him to look?)

Forcing that thought away, James grabs the notebooks out of the drawer, slams them down onto the floor, rifles through the papers that had been underneath them. He hears her come in the room and sit on the edge of the bed, watching him. Finally he finds the police report, shuffles through the stapled pages until he gets to the image taken of the numbers. He holds the packet out to her. She meets his eyes for a long moment after she takes the packet, finally looking down at the image printed on the page.

Juliet stares at it for awhile, but he watches a transformation on her face.

The pages flutter to the ground; she presses both hands over her mouth.


	64. 1742111225

**FYI, please just ignore me whenever I say how long this is going to be. My last estimate was 67 chapters and that's not accurate anymore. No more estimates from me. It will be obvious when it's ending, although I'll give a 1-2 chapter warning just in case.**

* * *

_"Now there was not this game to play, there was just a spent feeling. And she was no idiot, she could sense it."_

- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

- FLASHFORWARD (1925) -

Joe can't sleep his first night in the natives' camp. He's in a tent while his mother and that little-kid version of himself sleep probably a hundred feet away - they'd both agreed it would probably be too weird for him to stay with her.

Well, it is weird, but it's sweet, too. When his five-year-old self's eyes started drooping as they'd sat beside the fire, his mother had leaned over, whispered to the boy and scooped him up in her arms. He'd thrown both his arms around her neck and she'd stood to carry him inside. As she turned she caught Joe watching them, and she smiled at him, and kissed the boy's forehead, and it was almost like he could feel that kiss himself - or remember it, anyway.

But he can't stop thinking about Alice. This afternoon on the beach, his mother had immediately taken back her question, admitting that he shouldn't tell her anything, but the truth of the matter is: He doesn't even know what to tell her.

He clearly remembers that time when he was six (a fake six, but six anyway) - a few months after they'd come back from the island, and his mother had told him Alice was dead. That he could accept, but something didn't sit right with him, and he wasn't sure what. And he'd tried to do research on Alice, but that wasn't so easy. He doesn't even know her last name, and his mother had rarely spoken of Alice while he'd been growing up. The science is his, but his mother had always kept island history under lock and key - literally. The day she'd carried those notebooks out from her little office under the stairs, he'd thought, _This is it, this is everything._

Except she'd gone through multiple lines with a heavy black marker, and pages were clearly ripped out. "Oh come on, Ma, what the hell is this?" he'd complained.

She'd shrugged, not looking sympathetic in the slightest. "Sorry, buddy."

There was no mention of Alice anywhere in her notebooks.

- END FLASHFORWARD -

1742111225.

"They're dates," she says, bending to get the papers from the floor.

"Dates," he repeats, skeptical. "Don't look like no dates to me."

"1-7-42. 11-12-25." She can't breathe. "Different centuries. He was - he was - " She tightens her fingers around the pages.

"Jules, I don't understand."

"Where... it was on the basement door?"

"Yeah, written in marker. I painted over it, after." His face is full of confusion, fear.

But she's already standing, she's out the door, down the stairs. She takes the bend on the landing so fast she hangs onto the newel post, swinging around it to the next set of stairs. She flies through the living room, into the kitchen, stands in front of the basement door, exactly where her son stood on the way from his present to the island. To the day they met on the beach. She spreads her palms flat over the door, her fingers spread, trying to feel as much of the door as she can. "He didn't come back," she chokes out. "He didn't come back."

Juliet slides down, hitting the floor on her knees, her fingertips still on the door. James is right behind her, pulls her into his lap. She sinks back against him, lets the back of her head drop onto his shoulder, but she won't stop touching the door, the smooth thick paint.

"Juliet - if you don't tell me, I can't help you."

"You - " she tries, and dissolves into tears. How can she tell him? How can she tell him when it will destroy him, the way it's destroying her a little bit more almost every day? He hasn't been the same since they'd gone to see Miles; James obviously can't deal with the fact that she'd been dead. Not that she was overly thrilled about it, but she wasn't stunned by the news, and she'd prepared James for it in her own way, she'd thought. And she's OK now, mostly, or anyway she's here in his arms and that had to count for something, didn't it?

Jonah had broken into this house. At age 33, in the summer of 2012. Why? Why did he come here? And why wasn't there ever a corresponding set of dates, to hint he was at least on his way back to his present?

James doesn't say anything, just holds her tight and lets her sob, and she remembers for about the millionth time why she loves him. At some point she lets go of the door and she's hanging onto him with all her might, the way they clung to each other as she was hovering over that Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole that took her to her death, to her next life.

"It was a friend of mine," she finally manages. "One of Daniel's scientists."

"Here?"

"I guess so. They were coming from early 2042. I'm guessing January 7 would be the day he left."

"And the rest of it?"

"November 12, 1925. The day we met on the beach."

James is twisting his face in confusion. "So he came here? A year and a half ago?"

"A year and a half ago to you, I guess. I mean - the dates. I'm guessing they mean he was here in between his present and the island."

"...Why?"

She stares up at the door. "I honestly have no idea. There really wasn't anything missing from the house?"

"No, not that I ever noticed."

"He didn't... he didn't _leave_ anything, did he?"

"Nope."

Juliet bites her lip. "This just keeps getting more complicated, doesn't it?"

"Seems like it. You're sure he wasn't - I mean, he wasn't tryin' to do you any harm?"

She feels an involuntary smile. "That, I'm absolutely sure of."

He raises his eyebrows. "Oh, so _that's _how it was, huh?"

"James! No, that's not how it was. Don't even say that."

"All right, all right, I was just askin'."

They're both silent for a moment, and another wave of grief and panic washes over her, and she squeezes her eyes shut, trying to keep her tears at bay. After a few minutes she feels him shifting behind her, and suddenly he picks her up off the floor and carries her into the living room, tossing her on the couch. "Listen, Blondie, The Empire Strikes Back is on SyFy all night tonight."

She laughs through her tears and snuggles up to him on the couch, trying not to think about anything.

They wake in the morning wrapped up in each other and she feels like she can go on another day pretending like this all isn't going to crash in on her one way or another.

- FLASHBACK (1925) -

Juliet was vaguely aware it was early morning when she felt the unmistakable sensation of a face hovering directly over hers. She jerked awake, grasping at the air above her. Her eyes had barely focused when she saw Alice jumping back.

"Oh my God, Alice!" she gasped, holding her hand over her heart. "You scared the living daylights out of me! I hate when you wake me up like that!"

Alice frowned, but she still looked pretty damn pleased with herself. Jonah stirred beside Juliet and blinked his eyes open. "What is it?" he mumbled sleepily.

"It's Alice, buddy."

"Alice?" He sat up and grinned. "Hi!"

"See, now there's the greeting I was looking for. What, no 'Welcome back, Al, I missed you so much' from you, Jules?"

Juliet shook her head in disbelief. "You're lucky I'm not a screamer, or Dottie would have come in and lopped your head off by now." She paused, staring at Alice. "What the hell happened, Al? I thought - "

"Jules, I'm fine," Alice assured her. "Permission to approach?"

"Fine." Alice stepped forward and hugged them both tightly. Juliet was still shaking her head in disbelief. "Story," Juliet demanded.

"Fine, fine. I know I'm going to have to tell this one over and over today, anyway. Seriously, Jules, this was bloody ridiculous. First off, you did a lovely job on my shoulder, thank you, even the doctor in London said it was a beautiful job."

"In London," she repeated skeptically.

Alice looked guilty. "When I woke up after you'd fixed me up, I couldn't stop thinking about Robert." Her husband. "I knew I'd heal faster here on the island, but I was just - I was shaken by what'd happened and I just wanted him to take care of me. So I figured I could take a little bit of a jaunt and time things so I traveled back here just a couple hours after I'd left."

She was right, that was incredibly dumb - she definitely would have healed more quickly on the island, but leave it up to Alice to just do whatever the hell she wanted. "And?"

"Well, I stayed in London for awhile, but then I was in a bit of a car wreck - which just goes to show that you should stick with the evil you know instead of the evil you don't, doesn't it, love?"

Juliet was shaking her head all over again. She couldn't even remember what it was like to drive a car anymore, or ride in one. Was Richard really telling the truth? Was he really getting them off the island? Her grown-up son sleeping in a tent nearby had obviously been off-island - but what if they didn't really go any time soon? Or what if she hadn't gone with him? Now that this was staring her in the face, she wasn't sure if she could even go through with it. Here she'd killed, she'd lied, she'd time-traveled, she'd fought in a fucking war. Who would she be in the real world? Nothing would even feel real anymore. Somehow she felt it would be better not to mention any of this to Alice. "So... What happened?"

"Well, by the time I was ready to come back, time went all screwy on me. That ever happen to you? You sorta get pulled around with no control over it?"

Juliet nodded. "Yeah, it's happened to me."

"Well, it was really bloody unpleasant! Anyway, so much for my plan to pop back in after an hour or two. How long's it been?"

"A little over three months. Don't do that again! Leave a note or something, at least."

"Yes, Mum," Alice teased her, and gave her a quick nod.

"Wait a... Alice, what the hell happened to your nose?"

Alice covered her nose with her hand, looking sheepish. "I broke it in the car wreck. When the doc was setting it, I asked him to make it, well, you know. A bit cuter."

"You have got to be kidding me."

"What?" she said defensively.

"Here I am thinking you're dead or the man in black has you, and you're gallivanting around in London and getting a freaking _nose job?"_

Alice shook her head, grinning. "What's that thing you always used to say? Time travel's a bitch."

"Yeah, no kidding."

- END FLASHBACK -


	65. Miami

_"I can't believe this is really happening."_

- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

She really does feel better this morning; everything always seems worse at night for some reason. There could be a million reasons grown-up Jonah stopped by the house on his way to the island; just because he hadn't left another sign he was stopping through on his way back didn't mean anything. Not a thing.

(But why the hell did he come by the house in the first place?)

After she and James disentangle themselves from each other on the couch, he goes upstairs to wake the kids; she puts on coffee for James (lucky son-of-a-bitch) and goes into the laundry room to finish the clothes she never got to yesterday. They're leaving for Miami tonight, which means there are about a million things to do, and no time to think about things that aren't relevant to this specific day. Thank the universe for _that_, anyway.

James ducks his head into the laundry room, grumping about how Clementine beat him into the bathroom. "Last year I had to pry her outta bed with a damn crowbar," he grumbles.

Juliet looks up from sock-sorting. "That's good, that means you have plenty of time to start breakfast."

"So that's how it's gonna be around here, huh?"

"Pretty much."

"All right, so whaddya think? Think we should change our tickets?" Today's Thursday; Rachel's wedding is Sunday; James and Jonah are set to fly back Monday morning.

She shakes her head. "I'll be fine, I just need to get over it. Besides, I can't imagine they'd be exactly pleased with you taking a week off with literally no notice."

"Funny how that is, ain't it? All right, fair enough. And at least we won't be teachin' our kid all about truancy, 'cause I'm sure he'll figure that out for himself when the time's right. But you're gonna call me if you need me, right?"

"Yeah. It'll be fine. I can spend some time getting to know Julian better. And let's face it, I spend a week of winter in Miami while you get stuck shoveling snow without me? Sounds pretty good."

"Well, just don't get to used to it. We get enough snow while you're gone, I'll make sure to leave some for you to shovel."

She throws a dirty sock at him. "You're awfully sweet, you know that?"

* * *

Juliet rushes around the house that day, finishing packing, trying to figure out exactly how to fit her dress in the garment bag so that it has a chance in hell of arriving unwrinkled. She finds Clementine's current favorite sneakers - the red-and-silver ones - under the coffee table and groans because Clem's set to go straight to Cassidy's after field hockey today, but Juliet throws the shoes in her car, drops them off in Cassidy's mailbox and sends Clem a text message letting her know.

Being busy is helpful and if it weren't for all the kid stuff and the actual streets to drive on and the cell phones and the plane tickets, she could almost imagine she's back in Dharmaville living a happy little domestic life. Not bad.

Mornings really can be so good. It's the nights when things get hard.

* * *

Rachel picks them up at the airport and she's dealing with the wedding-related stress by being extra funny, which is Juliet's favorite version of stressed-out Rachel. Friday night they stage a bachelorette party from Rachel and Brian's bedroom, which basically involves Rachel and Juliet watching Dirty Dancing, shouting inappropriate things at the screen, and throwing popcorn at Patrick Swayze every time he appears in a tight T-shirt. Oh, and drinking too much wine. (So much for her not-drinking plan.)

The guys break up the party around 1 a.m., once Rachel and Juliet start prank-calling their cell phones.

* * *

Juliet's seen a lot of unbelievably weird things in her life. She's seen dead people walking through the jungle, chatted with a smoke monster, and gotten drunk with her time-traveling adult son.

But definitely up there on the "weirdest things she's ever seen" list? Her badass, generally convention-defying sister poofing out a fluffy white dress in the back of a Catholic church.

"I'm still not sure how you got in here without being struck by lightning," Juliet says, trying to help her straighten the layers of white fabric. She's bent down on one knee in front of her sister, her own dress pushed up to keep it clean, although keeping it wrinkle-free is not looking promising at this point.

"Speak for yourself, little sis. I'm all priest-approved and everything."

Juliet finishes and stands, smoothing out her own dress, a champagne-colored cocktail dress (hooray for 5 p.m. weddings?) with a subtle beaded design on the top. She and Rachel had picked it out over Thanksgiving, which was good because Rachel of course had to dictate ("No, this one is perfect!" "This is fancier than the dress_ I_ just got married in!" "Yeah, and whose fault is that?"). And bad because she had to lug the thing back to Oregon for alterations, and back again to Florida. Oh, the things one does for family. "And the priest was OK with the fact that you two have been living together for four years?"

"Oh yeah, he was totally thrilled. But hey, at least we couldn't have any out-of-wedlock children."

"This family is really pretty good at out-of-wedlock children."

"True, but what Brian's family doesn't know won't hurt them."

They smirk at each other. Brian's family has always known about Rachel's missing sister, so figuring out how to work Juliet back into the fold - with her fake name, no less - was a little tricky. Finally Rachel and Brian cooked up this little scheme about a third sister who'd lived on the West Coast for years, and _really, Aunt Diane, you never heard about Rachel's other sister? _Enter Leah Ford, wise-cracking mechanic from Oregon.

Just goes to show that people will believe anything if you act hurt they just hadn't been listening before.

The church coordinator pokes her head into the back room. "Five minutes good for you two?"

They nod, and shoot each other nervous glances once she ducks out again. "Don't trip on your dress," Juliet finally says.

"Likewise."

"If I trip over a knee-length skirt, I must have serious problems."

They laugh sort of nervously, still looking at each other. The silly smile slides from Rachel's face. "You have no idea how glad I am that you're here," Rachel tells Juliet, grasping her hand.

Juliet remembers. Remembers Rachel taking care of their mother while she was dying. Rachel crying with Juliet when they got the call about their father. Rachel going through chemo and radiation herself. Rachel sucking in her breath, never complaining as Juliet gave her injection after injection for experiments that would probably never work. Rachel's face that day in Juliet's apartment, telling her they_ did_ work. Rachel joking with Richard Alpert, telling him to bring Juliet back in one piece.

All Juliet can manage is "Ditto." And a couple minutes later she walks her sister down the aisle.

* * *

Rachel and Brian spend their wedding night in the hotel where they'd held the reception, and they leave for their honeymoon the next morning. James and Jonah pack up on that same day, and Juliet drives them to the airport in Rachel's car. She hugs Jonah extra-tight and tells him she's sure that Dad has some fun stuff planned for them for that week, which she knows he does.

There was a part of her that had worried she'd fall apart once no one was around to see it, but she doesn't let herself. Every day after she sees Julian off to school, she finds an activity for herself and sticks to it. One day she lugs out all of Rachel's old photo albums. She finds the pictures from her family's last vacation all together, can see how her parents' smiles don't quite reach their eyes. She would have laughed to herself at the clothing styles... except for the fact she lived through the '70s twice, and the clothes really were no laughing matter.

Another day she goes to an art museum, partly so she can report back to all concerned parties in her life: "I went to an art museum today." Rachel calls once or twice a day to talk to Julian and Juliet, who inevitably tells her everything's fine, and stop wasting time on the phone and go back to enjoying her honeymoon.

She and Julian shoot hoops in the driveway, they go to the movies a couple nights, she makes sure he gets all his homework done but improvises on his bedtime. Hey, what's the point of having your parents out of town if you can't have a little fun?

* * *

Last time Juliet spend a week in Miami without them, James had both kids, but the way the schedule worked out this time, it's just him and the boy. He finagles a deal with Cassidy, though, to take them both snowboarding one day after school. Clem is a snowboarding addict, and Jonah, having the I-can't-get-hurt attitude of most six-year-old boys, is pretty damn good. James is fairly certain, though, that one of these days he himself will break something important.

One night he teaches the boy how to play checkers, which he understands immediately, and after a few rounds he notices Jonah eyeing the chess pieces jumbled together in the box. So he starts telling him what the pieces are, what they can and can't do, but the word "pawn" feels funny in his mouth for some reason.

There was a part of him that had worried Juliet would fall apart once no one was around to see it, but they talk twice a day; he calls her in the morning so Jonah can talk to her, and she calls after the kid's in bed every night and reports on what she did that day. They'd tried putting Jonah on the phone with her at night, but he tended to get upset talking to her right before bed, so they were trying to stick to mornings only for the kid.

"I went to an art museum today," she tells him on Wednesday.

"I went to a field hockey game today," he replies, and she laughs.

"Wow, I've so never been to one of those." Which is total B.S., since out of him, Cass and Juliet, Juliet's the one who goes to more games than anyone. Working freelance, so to speak, has its perks. "Did they win?"

"Hell yeah they won! You shoulda seen Maddie though, she took a stick to the knee and..." And here they go again, gossiping about middle schoolers and debating the merits of winter field hockey being played indoors and whether watching 6-a-side is really that much less exciting than 11-a-side outdoors, and really, weren't they just the most domestic happy little suburban family ever?

* * *

James is having one of those fucking terrible nightmares again, the one where Juliet's hanging onto his hand telling him she loves him, so much, but she's being pulled away and she's just about ready to let go and he's begging her to hang on, he's got her, but this time a phone is ringing from the bottom of the pit and was there always a phone ringing, why is there a phone ringing?

He drags himself up from sleep and drags his cell phone off the bedside table. He glances at the clock - past 1 a.m. - before glancing down at the display. Juliet? What the hell? It's 4 a.m. in Miami - oh shit, what's the matter?

"Juliet?" he gasps into the phone, in a panic.

"James?" Her voice is hoarse.

"What is it - what's goin' on?" How could he have been in a dead sleep just seconds ago? He feels like he's never been more awake in his entire life.

There's a long pause, and he's just about to say her name again when he hears a sharp intake of breath, like she's struggling not to cry. "Do you think you could come back to Miami? Rachel's not getting back for two days and - " Why is her voice so hoarse?

"Yeah - God, yes, of course - what's goin' on?" he asks again, his panic and fear so full-blown that it takes him awhile to realize it sounds like she's not at Rachel's, but in a busy, bustling public place. At 4 a.m.? What the fuck? His heart is pounding - why won't she just say what's going on? "Juliet, where are you?"

Another long pause. "Jackson Memorial Hospital. Alice Widmore broke into my sister's house tonight. And we pretty much just beat the crap out of each other."


	66. 2 AM

_"This was customary within our friendship, confide and retreat, but I wondered. I wondered if perhaps our last conversation had been an overture. Not the conversation, exactly, but the silences within it."_

- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

How many times does she have to have this dream out here in the real world, the sensation of a face hovering directly over her own, Alice waking her up the night of the keys and all those other times when she needed or wanted something? Juliet opens her eyes up into the darkness of the guest room at Rachel's, measures out her breaths and closes her eyes again.

Except something's not right. Juliet keeps breathing, in and out, hopes the way her body stiffens slightly isn't obvious to whatever's watching her in the corner. This is still just a dream, right, she's just not woken up yet there's no way this is happening because this is not happening it is not even possible here in Miami in 2014 her nephew sleeping down the hall it's just that she's still dreaming that has to be it.

Juliet waits until she feels it again and knows she'll only have one chance to get this right. Alice is right-handed so Juliet shoots her left hand out from under the covers to snatch at whatever it is above her body, and she meets contact with an arm, grabs onto it, holding tight. Shock shoots through her entire body; she hadn't really thought this would really happen.

Except Alice is pressing a gun to Juliet's head with her left hand.

"Good try," Alice says approvingly. "Please let go of my arm now."

Juliet lets go. She finally opens her eyes, doesn't speak.

"Hello, love," says Alice.

"Please don't call me that."

"Oh. Well, what name would you _like_ to be called?" Alice says pointedly. Her face is just barely visible in the darkness. She looks to be the same age she was when Juliet last saw her, although Juliet knows from the dates on Alice's London tombstone that unless Alice time-travels extensively before the end of her life, she probably isn't going to get a whole hell of a lot older than she is right now.

"What do you want, Alice?" Sure. Why NOT ignore the barrel of the gun against her temple?

"I want to make sure you aren't going to do it."

"Do what?"

"Whatever it is Jacob wants you to do, of course."

"I'm not helping Jacob."

"You bloody hell better not."

"Why do you care so much? You're dead, Alice," Juliet says coldly. "You're fucking dead. I saw your grave." She is lying here so still, it's nothing like the way her heart is thudding.

"Not dead yet. Not to me. And you can't drown the island. You have to know how it heals - "

"Haven't we already had this conversation?" Juliet says. Tries to sound calm. Juliet knows she's a better shot than Alice, although that doesn't really matter right now, considering Alice has a gun pressed against Juliet's head. And they were pretty evenly matched in hand-to-hand combat - that, unfortunately, Juliet already has firsthand knowledge of. (Pointlessly she thinks of that first time she'd been possessed by Jacob's brother, pretending to freak out in front of Alice, pretending to beg her to please please please not to tell Richard.) But Juliet's bigger and stronger than Alice, and she's just going to have to wait for Alice to get the tiniest bit distracted.

"You're going to need to make a choice, love."

Juliet feels her blood turn to ice. "I'm sorry, did I _miss_ something, Alice? Was there ever a point when I had anything even remotely resembling free will on the island?"

Alice shifts slightly; Juliet feels the barrel of the gun grind against the skin of her forehead. Alice's little plan to surprise Juliet with her non-dominant hand was a good one - except now it means Alice is still holding the gun with that non-dominant, less-coordinated hand. Which means it should be easier for Juliet to get the gun away from her... right? "You had choices, love, you just never wanted to make any. You just waited and waited for something better to come along."

"I never had choices," Juliet bites out. "Not real choices. You and _Ben_ decided long ago to make sure I had none."

"Ben and I did what we needed to do. And if free will's an illusion, then why do you think I'm here?" Alice sounds so patient, and Juliet shoves down her anger; she has to save it up until she needs it.

"I don't know, you had nothing better to do tonight?"

Alice's lips twitch in the darkness. 

_Please please don't let Julian wake up. _

"Just trying to make sure you end up on the right side," Alice says lightly.

"There is no right side."

"There is, unless you want me dead."

Except Juliet is fairly certain that Alice's cancer will come _from_ Jacob. There's no way the island is going to heal her. There can't be. "That's pretty rich coming from someone who's got a gun on me."

"And you act like I won't kill you if you say the wrong thing."

But she won't... right? Juliet is supposed to still be alive in twenty years, she's been clinging to that. But she could still get shot tonight nonetheless. Or hell, sure she could still die, if things can still change. Which they still can. Right? Until there's some endpoint? _Goddammit, Daniel. Your fucking grandmother is trying to kill me right now. Can't you just do some goddamn math for me?_

"You ever think that being a double-agent was a pretty piss-poor career choice?" Juliet asks.

"Oh, I was never a double-agent, love," Alice coos. "That's just one of those things you like to tell yourself. Makes it easier to sleep at night. Tell yourself you didn't have your bloody head in the sand all those years."

"Are we going to stay like this all night or is something going to happen at some point?" Juliet keeps her upper body relaxed, but she starts building up the tension along the column of her spine, her lower back. She has to be ready.

"I don't want to kill you, Juliet," Alice says sadly. Juliet wonders if she's faking that sadness, keeps thinking. Alice is five foot three, five-four tops. Maybe a hundred and ten pounds. Oh, hell. Make it 108. It's just that she's got the gun.

"So don't." The safety's already off, it's been off this entire time. "You really think I want to help Jacob?" Sometimes she wonders if anyone was ever _really_ on Jacob's side. Oh, wait. Richard.

"I don't know, love."

Juliet maintains the tension in her back and listens to the silence in the house, the blood pounding in her ears. But when she hears the light flick on in the bathroom and sees Alice pause, Juliet knows this is probably the only chance she has. Juliet forces both arms up, knocking the gun away from Alice with one hand, the other smashing straight up into Alice's nose.

Alice screams and recoils at the sickening crunch, and Juliet sits up against Alice, throwing her to the floor as they both go diving for the gun. But Juliet had had the element of surprise, and she's reaching for the gun, which had gone skittering across the floor.

Alice is on her a moment later though, diving for Juliet's weak shoulder and yanking her arm back, and Juliet sweeps her leg out underneath Alice's feet, shoving her aside. Alice throws a punch that Juliet doesn't quite have time to duck, and Juliet hits her back as quickly as she can and then the door opens and light blinks into the room -

"Aunt Jul...?" Julian's mouth falls open in shock and they both jerk their faces up toward him.

"Go in your room and lock the door!" Juliet barks at him, and his eyes are wide with shock. "GO!"

Julian turns and runs.

Alice takes Juliet's momentary distraction to grab Juliet's hair at the base of her neck and wrap her slender fingers tightly around Juliet's neck, ignoring the torrent of blood from her own broken nose. "That your nephew? Stop looking at the gun, Juliet!" Alice's fingers tighten, and Juliet coughs as she feels her air supply cutting off. But she swings her arm back, hits Alice again, as hard as she can, and it's almost hard enough to knock her out. Alice lets go, looking dazed.

Juliet, sputtering and coughing, lunges for the gun near the bend in the wall. Alice dives onto Juliet's back, shoving her into the sharp corner of the wall, and Juliet can't hold back a scream as the corner digs into her ribs way too hard, feels a crack that leaves her breathless, but her hand is tight on the gun and she brings her arm around, smashes the gun into the side of Alice's head, and Alice falls into a heap on the ground.

Juliet jumps on top of her, almost crying out at the pain in her ribs, but she presses the barrel of the gun under Alice's chin. "Now, what were you saying, Alice?"

Alice (for once) is wordless, just looks up at Juliet in her own cold and calculating way. Juliet's fingers twitch on the trigger and she wants to pull it, wants to pull it for everything Alice tricked and manipulated her into doing over the years, for the fake way Alice trembled at the arsenal pretending to drop her own key. For the way Alice pushed Juliet into Nicholas as a distraction. For the way Alice was always the one to find her after Juliet blacked out, there to bring her back into consciousness. For the way Alice was waiting for Juliet that first night that Juliet stumbled into the camp, waiting for her on Ben's instruction.

But she can't pull that trigger. For the way Alice gave her sips of water while she was in labor. For the way Alice hugged her as she cried over James. For the days Alice laughed and tried to cheer her up and joked with her and fuck, Juliet can't pull the trigger but she can't show hesitation, either. Slowly she backs off of Alice, holding the gun tight with both hands, never letting her gaze waver.

"Get the fuck out of here and never come back."

Alice gets to her knees slowly, bracing herself with her hand as she gets to her feet. "Your mark is black, you know. Don't think you're not one of us."

"I was never one of you."

As Alice moves toward the door Juliet slowly swivels with her, following her movements with the gun in her hand. Watches Alice pause at the door. Listens to the siren in the distance that means Julian dialed 911.

Alice wipes slowly at the her blood on her face. "I loved you like a sister, you know," she says before she goes. "Guess that doesn't matter anymore."

No._ It really fucking doesn't._


	67. Night

_"You seem incredibly far away to me, like someone on the other side of a lake."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

Juliet creeps down the hall, the gun still in her hands. "Julian?" she whispers at his closed bedroom door. "Don't open the door yet, but are you OK?" Goddamn it hurts to breathe, and her voice is still hoarse from the way Alice had tried to choke her.

"Yeah," his voice comes through the door. "I called 911. Was that the right thing to do?"

"It was perfect, kiddo, thank you. I'm so proud of you. I'm pretty sure she's gone but just stay in your room until I let the police in, OK?"

"Yep."

Juliet goes downstairs, walking awkwardly because her ribs feel like they're on fire right now. She's watching every shadow, but the flashing lights pull up to the house. She empties the clip, removes the bullet in the chamber, lays the gun and ammo on the coffee table in the living room. Opens the door for the officers. "Boy, am I glad to see you," she says, like she didn't just fight off her own assailant and then let her go.

She allows herself to be persuaded that she and Julian need to go to the hospital, mainly because she's not sure what else to do. Then again, with the way she's feeling right now, she probably wouldn't say no to some good drugs. She can tell by the way the officers talk to her they think she's in shock -- but what she wants to tell them is she feels like she's been in shock for the past six years and this is probably the most normal she's ever felt since then. But then, that's her, her mind never stops racing even though she never, ever speaks about it.

The X-ray tech gives her a funny look over the mark on her back, which in the real world almost (although not quite) looks like just another bad tattoo.

In a way it's funny how much shit could go down on the island and proper medical procedures never really had to come into play. She gave birth in her cabin, she performed an appendectomy in a tent, her own time-traveling adult son stitched her up after Ben's whole knifey-knifey tantrum over the key... She rolls her eyes. If the staff here only knew.

By 4 a.m. they've decided to admit her for the night, courtesy of two broken ribs and having no one at home to take care of her. Her bad shoulder's aching where Alice grabbed it, and Juliet almost laughs thinking about the ways the left side of her body's been treated in life. Her mark is on the lower left side of her back; it's her left shoulder that's managed to face down the five dislocations, four of them on the island; her left collarbone with the scar, and now the ribs cracked on the left side. If she could just somehow clone and flip the right side of her body she should be good to go for another four decades or so. (She's seriously getting too old for this crap.)

The nurses set up a cot for Julian in her room, and she'll figure out arrangements for him once she talks to Rachel, but when she tries, the call goes straight to Rachel's voicemail. Poor Rachel, who can't even have an normal, happy, uninterrupted honeymoon thanks to Juliet.

"We'll try your mom back soon," she tells Julian, who's sprawled out on his stomach across his cot, looking exhausted. "Do you think you could try to get some sleep?"

"OK," he mumbles into his pillow. Julian is relatively unfazed by what happened, at least so far, with the cops and all the nurses praising him for his bravery.

Juliet finally has a chance to call James now, and she inhales sharply at the thought (which seriously hurts way too much despite the hefty dosage of Vicodin they gave her about twenty minutes ago). She just wants to spare him, from all of this. He's really not going to take this well at all, how could he? And still, she feels slightly guilty waking him up in the middle of the night. But if she's honest with herself, she needs him here with her, she needs him here as soon as possible, and she feels no shame in admitting that to herself for a change. But now, all of a sudden, that Vicodin is starting to kick in and she feels like she's going to fall asleep at any second.

"Juliet?" he gasps into the phone, already in a panic.

She doesn't know how to even begin so she just says his name.

"What is it -- what's goin' on?" He's still struggling to wake up, she can tell.

She pauses to let him get his bearings but breathes in a little too hard, and wow, that hurts. "Do you think you could come back to Miami? Rachel's not getting back for two days and -- " She pauses while a commotion passes by out in the hall.

"Yeah -- God, yes, of course -- what's goin' on?" he asks again, clearly panicking. "Juliet, where are you?"

Her eyes drop closed. Damn Vicodin. "Jackson Memorial Hospital. Alice Widmore broke into my sister's house tonight. And we pretty much just beat the crap out of each other."

"What the... Alice _Widmore?_ Widmore? _Your_ Alice? Why did she -- wait a -- she's time-traveling?"

"Considering I didn't just get into a fight with a 114-year-old woman, yes, James, she's time-traveling." She can hear a clatter now coming from James' end of the conversation, and imagines him throwing clothes and toiletries into a duffel bag, even before he's checked flight information.

"Jesus Christ, Juliet, are you and Julian -- why did Alice -- you talked to Ra -- what are you -- " His questions are falling over themselves and he can't seem to bring himself to finish any of them.

"I just left Rachel a message to call me. Julian's fine. He was really, really brave, he called 911. I'm OK, just have some bruises and, um, a couple of broken ribs."

"That don't sound fine to me! What are they -- did they get Al -- you're at the hospital?"

"Alice got away. Sort of. I'll tell you later. They're keeping me here overnight. Julian's in the room with me, I -- " Her phone lights up. "Hang on... Rachel's calling me back. Book a flight for you and Jonah, and I'll call you right back, OK?"

"Jesus Christ, Juliet. OK. I love you."

"I love you back," she says, and takes a deep breath (_ow ow ow_) and flips over to Rachel's call.

"Juliet? What the hell? It's like four in the morning there! Is Julian OK? Are you OK?"

"First of all, don't freak out," Juliet warns.

"How come whenever someone says something like that, there's always a really, really good reason to freak out?"

"Julian's right here beside me, he's absolutely fine and I'll put him on in a second, but someone broke into the house tonight -- "

"WHAT? Someone broke into the -- what the -- is -- why? What happened?"

"It was someone from the island. We're fine. Julian was incredibly brave and he called 911. He's right here, OK?"

She passes the phone to her nephew before she has to listen to Rachel freaking out any more. How come everyone else gets to flip out and she's just sitting here numb?

Finally Julian hands her the phone back. "Hey," she says.

"You're not _really_ OK, are you? Julian said you're in the freaking hospital! Brian and I are changing our tickets, we're coming back as soon as we can."

"Rachel, don't..."

"You can act like this doesn't affect you but you're my sister and my son just had to call 911 because some woman was attacking you and now you've -- it's not like we're just gonna keep prancing around Italy, for God's sake! Why are you in the hospital?"

"Couple of broken ribs and no one to take care of us," she admits. "But James is going to fly out with Jonah in the morning."

"Couple of broken _ribs?_ What the hell kind of woman was this?"

_My best friend. _"Would it make you feel any better if I told you I won the fight?" Juliet just wants to hang up and go to sleep.

"God, what did you manage to do to her?"

"Smacked her in the head with her own gun. Oh, and I broke her n-- _I broke her nose," _she gasps out in a whisper. Alice, coming back to the island with her nose changed. Right before the end.

Rachel either doesn't pick up on Juliet's change in tone or simply doesn't understand what it means. Because really, how could she? "Well, I don't care who won that fight, someone broke in with a goddamn gun, and Brian and I are coming back as soon as we can."

"Fine."

_"Fine?_ You can really be impossibly stubborn and passive-aggressive, you know that?"

"Hey, I won one hell of a fight tonight and you're berating me for being stubborn?"

"God, Juliet, I'm so glad you two are OK. But what are we gonna do now?"

"What do you mean?"

"They know how to find you? Is this gonna happen again? What did they even want?"

"I guess so, I don't know, and you'll never believe me in a million years. Can I just go to sleep now? I still have to call James back."

"OK. I'll send you a text when I know when we're getting in. What hospital are you at?"

"Jackson Memorial, but James will probably get here before you do, so I'll let you know where we end up. I think I'm going to buy you an alarm system this weekend."

"Jules, please don't take this the wrong way, Brian's a lawyer and you're a mechanic. I think we can handle the alarm system ourselves. Now go get some sleep, weirdo mystery island fighter. I'm going to have to avoid pissing you off in the future now I know you can disarm someone by breaking their nose."

"Actually, I broke her nose _before_ disarming her."

"Jesus Christ. OK. Go to sleep, little sis. Love you."

Her eyes are closing already. "I think I'm falling asleep. Could you call James back for me and tell him just to text me?"

"Yeah. Love you," Rachel says again.

"Love you too." All it takes is getting beaten up to have everyone in your life telling you that. Not bad. And it's only in the last instant before sleep that it occurs to her. Both James and Rachel repeatedly asked her how she _was_, but she knows they weren't asking how she _felt_.

Has she really gotten so good at hiding her feelings that they think she doesn't have any?

------ FLASHBACK (1920) ------

Alice and Dottie had been up all night and then all day with her, and Juliet finally shooed them out (without getting out of bed, but shooed them nonetheless) a couple of hours after the baby was born. He was all wrapped up in blankets in his little basket next to her bed, and after the door clicked closed, Juliet rolled onto her side to watch him sleep. She tried to figure out who he looked like, but he'd been awake (and/or not screaming with his face all screwed up), for all of five minutes in the past two hours. And mostly he just looked like any other wrinkly newborn with a squished-up forehead.

She wondered if she should try to feed him again, but he'd cry when he was hungry, right? Maybe she'd try in another hour if he didn't wake up again.

It felt ridiculously strange to be alone with this baby who had seemingly just appeared out of nowhere; even though she'd insisted Alice and Dottie leave to get some sleep, this whole thing barely made sense. It was like one moment she was in a Dharma van with James and the next she was screaming at an empty crater and now, here she was with this anonymous tiny person who'd basically just spent thirteen hours trying to kill her.

She'd somehow drifted off to sleep when the baby started to whimper, and she startled awake in that head-throbbing, nauseous haze of sleep deprivation, but then, she'd probably just welcomed herself to at least several months of sleep deprivation, so who was she to complain? The way she lifted him out of his basket felt awkward; her hand cradled his head and the whole thing was just... strange.

"Tell me if I'm doing something wrong, OK?" she asked him.

He barely opened his eyes while he nursed, and if it hadn't hurt more than she'd expected (he must have not quite gotten the hang of it the first time? Or he did the first time but not this time? Anyway, ow), she probably would have had to force herself to stay awake so she wouldn't drop him. But as it was, she watched him, and looked around this cabin that she guessed was their home now, and she looked at the tiny pink shell of his left ear that somehow spiraled just the way that James' had.

After he'd finished eating and she'd burped him and felt like she was doing it all in a ridiculously fake way that he must somehow be able to tell, she laid him across her knees and he finally opened his eyes, wide.

"Oh, now that's just weird," she said to him, and he blinked at her with those eyes that were just like her own, and she smiled. "Who said you could have those, buddy?" In a way she was relieved it wasn't James' eyes staring out at her; that probably would have been too hard. Then again, maybe this way would just end up making her feel lonelier.

She ran her fingertips along his cheek. She was going to have to figure out a name for him sometime soon. For some reason she'd been convinced she was having a girl. Maybe because James already had one? She wasn't disappointed she'd had a boy, not at all, but she didn't even have a name for one. She wouldn't name him after James, that was for sure. She was sure he would have absolutely hated that, and anyway, she didn't think she would ever have been able to stand saying that name a million times a day.

Alice was back a few hours later, after it was dark again, and just in time, because Juliet hadn't realized she'd never contemplated what the hell she would do when she had to go to the bathroom. Or, the "bathroom," whatever. She hobbled outside and Alice was already cooing to him. Thank God she didn't have to be alone in this.

When she got back, Alice was in the rocking chair that Nicholas had made for Juliet last month. "Go back to bed, don't mind us," Alice whispered. Juliet was only too glad to take her up on the offer, falling asleep for another couple hours until the baby got hungry again.

"Sorry, Jules, there are just some things I can't do for him," Alice said as she poked her awake.

Juliet took him back, got him set up. Alice turned away politely, although at this point Juliet didn't really care what Alice saw, considering she'd already seen all sorts of blood and gore the day before. In retrospect, Juliet was fairly certain she'd managed to only narrowly avoid puking directly _on_ Alice.

"Think of a name yet, love? I don't think Eva is really going to suit him."

"Oh, I don't know, he and I talked about it over a beer and he said that would be fine by him."

Alice rolled her eyes. "Right, I'm sure. Well, at least one of us was prepared for this little possibility." She pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket. "I made a list of names."

Juliet smiled sleepily. "Seriously?"

"Yes! I was sure that if the baby was a boy, you'd end up too sleep-deprived to think of one any time soon. And I was _clearly_ right about that." She handed over the crumpled piece of paper. "Here."

Juliet took the list with her free hand, looked it over. "Jonah," she said thoughtfully. "That's nice."

Alice nodded. "I knew you would like that one." She reached out and touched the baby's forehead. "It means 'peace'."

------ END FLASHBACK ------

James feels like the hugest asshole in the world.

Juliet had out-and-out _told_ him she was afraid staying at Rachel's alone, then she went and took it back, he believed her like an idiot, and now she's in the hospital, obviously doped up on pain meds with no one to look after her because he's all the way across the goddamn country.

Then again... Alice! _Alice?_ Alice was supposed to be her friend. What the hell had happened there? But she'd said Alice "was" her friend. He'd put that together with the whole "Alice is dead" issue. But fuck, that wasn't even exactly true, was it?

(Time travel's a bitch.)

And what is or isn't true with Juliet, anyway? How much longer is she going to keep extending nothing more than tiny pieces of truths to him like individual strands of a thread, so thin they're nearly invisible on their own?

He hangs up with the airline (NOT Oceanic, thankyouverymuch) after booking himself and Jonah on a 6 a.m. flight, goes into the bathroom with the duffel, shoves toiletries into the side pocket. His face is crumpled up with confusion and anger in the mirror and he hits the light switch hard as he leaves.

Juliet still hasn't called him back yet -- is there anything she's going to want? He grabs a couple books she's been planning to read, then pauses at the desk. Would she want her notebooks? Maybe.

But this time when they're in his hands, something in him cracks. He's standing in the middle of this bedroom alone, his wife is in the damn hospital and he still has no idea why.

The blue notebook is on top. He flips it open. It's all in Latin. Every fucking page.

He throws it to the ground, opens the second notebook. All in Latin. Every. Fucking. Page.

For some reason this scares him more than anything.


	68. Robot Overlords

_"The feeling between us was mournful and desperate. We could not look away from each other, every inhalation was a question: Yes? Followed by: Yes. Falling and catching and falling and catching, we descended into a precarious and vivid place; I had always known it was there but had never guessed where."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

James and Juliet fill in each other's empty spaces. They always have, always will. And maybe that's the problem, or maybe that's the point.

Her notebooks scare him, that she writes them in Latin like she's just going to be an Other forever, no matter what place, what time. And obviously she must have anticipated that someone (him), sometime, would want to peek at those notebooks. And she didn't trust him, and it turns out that she actually shouldn't.

It's after 6 p.m. by the time he and the boy get to the hospital; the earliest flight he could get wasn't direct, and the time difference was in the uncooperative direction. A friend of Rachel's had come earlier in the day to pick up Julian; Rachel and Brian were scheduled to land around 8. James spent all his time during the Chicago layover on the phone with an alarm company in Portland that would allow a neighbor to let them in for installation; he got that same neighbor to agree to feed the cat. And he'd emailed work from his cell phone at a red light on the way to the airport, had called Juliet twice, even called Rachel. The damn phone is glued to his hand at this point.

At the front desk of the hospital he almost says her real name before he catches himself, and the orderly looks up Leah Ford in the computer, purses his lips and asks for his name and a form of identification. This doesn't seem like standard operating procedure for an ordinary hospital, and he realizes Juliet's probably on some sort of security lockdown. (Christ.) "Fourth floor, east side," the orderly tells him. "They'll help you from there."

James had told Jonah she'd been in a car accident, but she was gonna be just fine, and Jonah had thought about that in his quiet intense way for a moment. "Alice was in a car accident and then her nose looked different," he'd said thoughtfully. "Is Mama's nose gonna look different?"

"Nah, but she's gonna have some bruises and stuff. It'll get all better soon though. You just gotta be careful, don't hug her too hard or nothin'."

"Sometimes she got hurt on the island, too."

"Yeah, well, we're gonna make sure that kinda thing don't happen no more, OK?"

At the fourth floor east side nurses' station, they go through the same rigamarole with name and ID. Finally the nurse nods. "Room 408." _Well, of course. Can't do anything in life without the damn numbers getting involved._

Now they pause at the door to room 408. She's sleeping, curled up on her side around a pillow, her hair falling over her face. "Is she OK?" Jonah asks anxiously, reaching up for James' hand.

"'Course she is, she's just restin'," James whispers back, but he sees Juliet shift and open her eyes, brushing her hair out of her face. There's a shiny purple bruise on her cheek, and streaky black-and-blue marks across her throat.

"Hey, you two," she says hoarsely, reaching out an arm.

God, she looks bad. James wants to step forward and wrap his arms around her, but Jonah's shrinking back, hiding halfway behind him, and James sees the sadness in Juliet's eyes. "Hey, buddy," she whispers. "Hey. It's OK. You can stay over there if you want."

"But Alice was in a car accident and she was fine," Jonah says, his lower lip trembling.

Juliet's eyes flicker to James with understanding. "Well, Alice was in a car accident, but it was awhile before we saw her again. Remember, she said she hurt her nose?"

"Yeah."

"Well, this is like that, buddy. It'll get better. Like when you scraped your knees falling off your bike, right?"

"Yeah."

James watches their exchange, Jonah still squeezing his hand tightly, and James' heart cracks just a little, to see their son afraid to go to her. Because, face it, Juliet's always been the parent Jonah's gone to, obviously for all those years on the island, and even now, off of it, out of habit and comfort and familiarity. "Hey Obi-Wan, you mind freein' me from your Jedi grip for two seconds so I can give your mom a kiss?"

Jonah nods at up at him, slowly uncurling his fingers and dropping James' hand, but he hangs back as James steps toward Juliet, cups her cheeks in his hands and gives her the most delicate kiss he can manage. She closes her eyes tight, her fingertips against his neck, and when they pull apart, her eyes are bright, too bright. "It's so good to see you guys," she says softly, glancing back over at Jonah.

James drags a chair over to the bed. "Hey kiddo, you know your crayons and stuff are in your backpack, right?"

Jonah considers this for a moment and then nods, heading for the far corner of the room. Juliet bites her lip, watching.

"He'll come around."

"It's just -- he's been though so much, James."

James nods, interlacing his fingers with hers. "He's just a little freaked out seeing you like this. Hell,_ I'm _a little freaked out seeing you like this."

Juliet starts to laugh and then squeezes her eyes shut for a moment, cringing. "Don't make me laugh right now."

"Hurts?"

"Yeah. They've been keeping me pretty drugged up, but I told them to knock it off."

"Right, I forgot how you hate that feelin'. And it ain't like I ever caught you and Amy out in the backyard tokin' up with Horace's little 'California blend' or nothin'."

Her face goes expressionless. "I have no idea what you're even talking about."

"Yeah, that or you just didn't wanna share. Either way, I bet it's just all a blur to ya, right?"

She rolls her eyes. "It was the '70s and I plead the fifth."

"Seriously, Jules, they want you to take painkillers, take the damn painkillers."

"I will. I just needed a break from feeling that way. Not that the pain's better, but..." She shrugs grimly. "They want to keep me here another night."

"What?" he growls, alarmed. "How come?"

"Well, usually with cracked ribs, the patient's main danger is contracting pneumonia from not inhaling deeply enough over time. Since it hurts to breathe. And they seem to find me a little uncooperative on that front."

"'Cause of your throat?"

"Yeah."

"That _bitch_," he mutters under his breath.

"James..." Her eyes are huge and so very, very blue. She touches his wrist. "Don't."

"Why didn't you tell me, Jules? About... I mean... She just betrayed you?"

Juliet is shaking her head, looking sad and ashamed. "She was a plant for the other side. Just... _always_. She was working with Ben." She glances over to Jonah, coloring away in the corner chair. "Let's talk about this later. Jonah loved her...." Juliet brings her eyes back to James. "So did I."

She looks like she's forcing back tears, and he leans forward, kisses her forehead, his hand on her neck under her hair. "It's gonna be OK. You're here now, I'm here, nothin' else is gonna happen. They're puttin' an alarm in on our house tomorrow, Rachel's getting everything set up on her end here, you're not goin' running alone anymore, and we'll deal with it."

She holds tight to his hand, their foreheads still pressed together. "I feel like I'm putting you all in danger," she says softly.

"That ain't true," he says, tracing her lower lip with his thumb. "And there's safety in numbers, right? You know they practically got ya on lockdown in this hospital?"

"Yeah. I had to give them a list of authorized visitors." He pulls away to see her better, and she arches an eyebrow, trying to come off as brave. "And considering the way you just wipe crumbs off the kitchen counter onto the floor when you're not paying attention, you should consider yourself lucky I even wanted to see you."

"And considerin' the fact that I was tryin' to get motor oil off the counter, I'd say that makes us even."

"Mama?" Jonah asks suddenly from across the room.

Juliet's face fills with hope. "Yeah, buddy?"

"If you wanna eat chicken, that's OK." Juliet clearly has to hold in another painful laugh. If they didn't live in the Portland area and know better, they would've been convinced they were raising the only militantly vegetarian child in the United States. "That's really sweet of you, buddy, thank you." She slides her eyes back to James, who's trying not to laugh too.

"So how's hospital food, by the way?" he asks her.

"Wretched."

"You want us to go out and get you somethin'?" He can tell she's about to see no until he adds, "There's a Thai place around the corner," and he starts to see the wheels turning.

"Yeah, I do," she admits. "Tom yum soup and... hmm, lettuce wraps with chicken?" She smiles over at Jonah.

"I think we can do that, whaddya think, kiddo?" James reaches an arm out experimentally, and the boy slides off his chair and bravely crosses the room, sinking into James' lap.

"You're really gonna be OK?" Jonah asks.

"I'm really gonna be OK," Juliet assures him. "At least as long as you can help Dad go get me some food."

James stands up with the boy (good God he's getting big). "We'll be back real soon, Jules."

She nods appreciatively, but as they turn to go, she reaches out and grabs his arm. "James," she says in an odd tone.

"Yeah?"

"Did Desmond ever get off the island? After... After the reset?"

Why is she asking this now? "Uh... Yeah. His woman -- what's her name, Penny? She tracked him down in her boat, with bearings she got from Twitchy. You know, the same ones he didn't give to me," he growls out. "Before we got our memories back, 'round 2005, I think."

"He had the bearings?"

"Yeah."

"Maybe not for the past, though."

_Duh._ That makes sense. "But would he have known you were in the past, back then?"

"No. I don't think so. Unless his father..." She grins and looks up at him. "No, probably not." Jonah is starting to shift from foot to foot, impatiently, and James shoots him a warning look. "Did you bring my yellow notebook?" Juliet asks.

"Uh... Yeah." He shuffles through the duffle he'd tossed on the floor, pulls it out, finds a pen.

"One last question. Have you ever seen Alex and Karl off-island?"

...Alex and Karl? "No," he says shortly. She nods, not meeting his eyes, and he kisses her forehead again, and takes Jonah to get her food.

------ FLASHBACK (1925) ------

Her grown-up Jonah was draining the coffee from the percolator in the morning when she and her little Jonah got to the kitchen area. "So yesterday wasn't a really weird dream after all," she said.

"Sorry to say, it wasn't." He looked at his little self. "You hungry, buddy?"

Jonah nodded.

"OK, oatmeal coming right up. Here, M-- Juliet." He handed over a cup of coffee. "I didn't know if you guys had any milk over here?"

"Powdered only, it's in that cabinet." She pointed.

"Ah, thanks." He ducked down to fetch it and held it out to her.

"Oh, no thanks, I don't like milk in my coffee."

"You don't?" He looked confused.

"No," she replied, shaking her head.

"Weird. Well, you will."

Juliet froze, the cup halfway to her lips. There were about a thousand implications to his statement, and she stared at his back as he measured out oatmeal. He turned and caught her looking. "What?" he asked.

"I really get off the island, don't I?"

He gave her a crazy look. "Of course you do. Why would you -- wait, you thought I got off without you?"

"I don't know. I didn't know. I -- oh my God. Oh my God." She sat there in shock, that this could ever be over, that she could ever see her sister again, that she and her son had a chance in hell of ever living a normal life. (At least until he came back here and what the hell was that all about, anyway?) "Oh my God," she said again. "What... What the hell am I supposed to do off the island?" She pointed a finger at him. "Don't answer that."

He lifted the lid off the pot of oatmeal, stirred it, started dishing it out. "You'll be OK," he said, extending a bowl of oatmeal to his younger self.

She peeled a banana and handed it to her little Jonah. "I don't even know what the real world is like anymore. What year am I supposed to be in?"

"2013." He handed her a bowl of oatmeal and plopped down on the bench across from her. "Now first off, humanity's been overtaken by robot overlords. Secondly, everyone has to wear helmets to fend off the fallout from the atomic wars." He popped his spoon into his mouth.

"Wiseass," she muttered, and began to eat her oatmeal.


	69. The Long Con

_"Now that I know, it seems so obvious. Suddenly there is nothing I remember that doesn't contain a clue."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

------ FLASHBACK CONTINUED (1925-1923) ------

"So what are you doing today?" her grown-up Jonah asked her.

"Whatever I'm doing, I'm doing it right now."

"Mind if I bring you to our other camp? There's someone there I'd like you to see."

"Why'd you come find me?" she said suddenly. "You said you've been on the island for almost a year. Why now?"

"Don't tell me you'd pass up this chance if you'd had it."

She stared at him. "Dumbass. I did have it. I lived in the '70s for three years! I could have taken the sub, and...."

"Oh yeah," he muttered. "Wow, that _was_ pretty dumb of me. Not that it was all that polite, the way you pointed it out."

She rolled her eyes. "Physicists. Heads always in the clouds. All right, Doctor Genius, you have any weapons on you? It's not exactly safe to go wandering through the jungle without anything, and last I saw, you were depending on your mommy for protection."

"Uh, yeah, I kinda don't like carrying a gun," he hedged. "I'd probably be a pacifist, if I wasn't born into a crazy war thing."

"You know, when I first got here, I hated guns."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. I also didn't believe in God." She laughed. "Meet me at the creek in two hours. And could you ask Dottie to, um, watch yourself?"

He crossed his arms over his chest. "Weirdest family ever."

_I take it you've never met Eloise Hawking_, she thought.

* * *

Juliet circled the long way around to the arsenal; she just wanted one rifle for protection, and she'd grab a handgun for him (she hoped he would know how to use it in a crisis; why did she forget to ask him that?). But she didn't want him to know about her stolen key; it was just safer to keep that to herself. She fetched what she needed and started toward the creek. When a twig cracked behind her, she spun around, whipping her rifle off her shoulder, but it was just her son, holding up his hands.

"You scared me there," she said.

"Well, thanks for not blowin' my head off, Doctor Warrior," he said dryly, suddenly sounding very much like his father.

Strange._ Unless... _She shook that thought from her head. Better not to wonder about it. "Tell me I took you to the shooting range while you were growing up."

"Oh yeah, every Sunday after church. Well, except for the church part."

"Yeah, that sounds like us. OK, here." She pulled the gun from the back of the waistband of her pants and slapped it into his hand. (He looked appalled.) "Just in case. Only thing is, we're low on bullets and I didn't want anyone to get suspicious, so just keep your fingers crossed the other side doesn't try to ambush us, all right?"

"This is, like, straight out of 'Terminator 2'."

His quip made her think of Hugo Reyes suddenly, someone she hadn't thought of in years, and she wanted to laugh but then she felt a sharp pang for that day they all showed up in Dharmaville, and her little pregnancy surprise, just like that, turned into a horrible secret. "Come on."

They'd taken all of three steps when they both stumbled backward, pressure behind their eyes, in their lungs. They lay on their backs when it was over, and Juliet drew a dirty hand over her eyes for a moment. "Was that what I think it was?"

"Yeah. Time sorta caved in on itself. _Again. _Shit."

"Now what do we do?"

"Aren't you the island expert?" he scoffed.

"And aren't you the time travel expert?" she replied.

"You have to go throw that in my face. OK, let's look for something manmade."

"Well, jeez, even I would have known to do that."

"Wiseass."

"Let's stop at the creek first, get some water."

"Fine." He narrowed his eyes at her, practicing a blue glare of death.

"Fine." She shot the glare back at him, but couldn't hold it for long before she started to laugh. But as she stepped into the clearing of the creek, her heart flipped. There was a tall woman there, filling a pail, her blond hair curling at her shoulders. Was today _this_ day? Was this day, _that_ day? Before she could think of what to do, the other Juliet turned around slowly.

_Dammit_. "Sorry," she said, wincing, glancing back over her shoulder. She fluttered a hand behind her to signal Jonah to stop. "This is a little awkward, huh?"

The younger Juliet stared at her, and she forced herself to look happy, to giver her younger self some hope, something to hang onto for the future. She was going to go home, right?

"I was here first," her other self hedged.

Juliet smirked. "You got that right. Sorry, I'm thirsty. Gimme a second." She uncapped her canteen and dipped it into the creek.

Her other self folded her arms and watched.

"Do you have to stare at me like that?" Juliet asked. "It's kinda creepy." She splashed some water onto her face, wiped away a thin layer of dirt.

"You're me, I'm you, I'll watch if I want. Glad that haircut is growing out."

"Yeah, it's taking forever."

"Huh. You know, we're wearing the same shoes. I mean -- the exact same shoes."

Juliet stood. "Trust me, this is just as weird for me as it is for you. Don't worry, I'm leaving now." Wait, maybe this other Juliet had some bullets. Oh, but she herself hadn't, when she was the younger one in this situation. Might as well ask, just to be safe, right? "Hey, you don't have any bullets on you, do you?"

Her other self shook her head.

"That's OK. I didn't have any either, when I was standing where you are now."

"Um. Since you're here, can I ask you something?"

Oh no. Juliet forced on her poker face, but the shiver of anguish that ran through her was cold. This was right before the day with the keys. She'd been trying to sort out whether Nicholas was working for the man in black.

Could Juliet just end this all now, head it off at the pass? Warn her other self, change it all? But she was supposed to be going home. Her son would grow up off the island. They were going to have a chance at life, at real life. If she told herself -- could it change? Yes. No. Nicholas would have to stay dead, would have to, so she knew her son would be safe. It wasn't even really a choice at all, no matter how much she instantly hated herself over it.

"No. Sorry." Her poker face faltered. But she couldn't do this, she had to say something -- she took a breath in to speak, but in that instant her resolve returned, and she shook her head. She was just another one of them, an evil Other who let people die, who let people stay dead, if it suited her own needs. She felt a tiny little piece of her soul crumble off and roll away.

Her other self exhaled slowly, disappointed. "Fine."

"Well, um..." She couldn't hold back a single-note laugh, anticipating what her younger self would say.

The other Juliet nodded. "See you later, I guess."

(It really was a good line.)

--------- END FLASHBACK ------

Rachel and Brian show up at the hospital just before 9, right at the edge of visiting hours; Rachel fusses over Juliet, and when they leave for their hotel -- no one's sleeping at the house until after the alarm's put in tomorrow -- they take Jonah with them. At least he's stopped being so afraid of Juliet, and he hugs her good-bye carefully.

James hasn't let go of her hand in half an hour, since he last went to find a nurse to give her something for the pain. Now the hazy feeling is coming over her again, but he's determined to stay with her all night, and miraculously the nurses have agreed to look the other way after everything Juliet's been through.

"You can let go of my hand if you need to," she tells him. "I promise I'm not going to bolt out the door any time soon."

"So what's the story, Juliet?"

"What story?"

"Alice."

She closes her eyes and feels the old familiar sadness roll through her stomach. She never stops losing people.

"You still in pain?"

"It's not that. It's just -- Alice."

"Yeah," he says, like he knows. Which he does. And doesn't.

"James, I lived with a former conman for three years. And I couldn't even see when I was being conned." She drops her head back onto the pillow, moves her calves against the scratchy hospital sheets. "She was working with Ben. From day one. And everything Ben knew about me -- he turned it into a weapon for them." She squeezes her eyes shut, and the tears finally start to come. The kind of pain that Vicodin can't resolve, the kind that never goes away, not for long. Like her headaches. And she hates Alice for making her hate herself.

"Jules..."

"Just... Just let me talk." She's trying to talk around the tears, can almost make herself sound normal. "Ben _knew_ how much I needed my sister. So what happened? She became like a sister to me. And he knew how much I missed _you_. So he had her push me toward a man who showed me kindness. Because he knew about Goodwin -- he knew what would happen if I got lonely enough. And when there was suspicion that someone was a double agent -- Alice made sure that all the suspicion fell on _him_. And then she had me banished from the camp when I had doubts about _her_." She stops crying long enough to grind her teeth together in anger. Because while some days it feels like she'll never get over her sadness, there are so many more days where it felts like she will. never. stop. being. SO. FUCKING. ANGRY. She is fucking shaking with anger now.

"And of course she made sure that it _never_ looked like her _own_ fucking idea!" Juliet bursts out. "Not fucking once. She -- just -- my whole life -- THE WHOLE TIME!" She's half-sitting up on the bed now, clutching a handful of sheets so tightly she can feel the way she's losing circulation in her fingers.

"You don't -- Juliet, look at me. You're not still blamin' yourself for what happened there, are you?"

"I know maybe I shouldn't, but... seriously, James, how could I NEVER have caught on? NEVER? Am I really that _clueless_? And obviously Ben knew how my insecurities about being a doctor had grown on the island. So what'd he do? He made sure Alice could set me up for failure again and again, giving me hopeless cases. They wanted to destroy me. Every insecurity, every weakness I had -- they exploited it. ALL of it."

He couldn't possibly be squeezing her other hand any tighter than he is right now, and she wiggles her fingers as a signal to loosen up. "Sorry," he says awkwardly. She forces herself to loosen her grip on the sheets, concentrates on breathing slow and deep like the doctor wants her to.

"I should have realized. I just... _should have realized._ More than once Alice mentioned she was working for the good of the island. Once I knew it was Jacob trying to destroy it, I should have put that together in my head."

"Do you... Why didn't they just tell you?"

"Can you please just get in this bed with me?" She looks at him, pleading, slides over as much as she can.

"Thought you'd never ask." He settles in next to her, as much as he can on the narrow bed, keeping his left leg on the floor. She rests her head on his chest, tries to calm down. She closes her eyes and waits for the shaking to stop, waits until she feels him start stroking her hair, and then she feels like maybe she can continue after all. "Richard knew that if I knew the truth about Jacob from the beginning, I wouldn't want to help. And I guess Alice and Ben's side... well, I'd been told so often -- and for so long -- that Jacob was the good one. I would never have just gone over to his brother's side."

"Would it be wrong to ask you why you didn't? I mean, not that you'd wanna be workin' for Ben... or Alice, considerin' what she done to you... but if Jacob wanted to drown the island, he'd be killin' everyone on it."

"The only answer I can give you is that the team from the future told me it has to be like this."

"But how'd they -- "

"It doesn't matter. And anyway, Alice and Ben thought they would just destroy me a little bit at a time, again and again. Because once I was broken enough, Jacob would give up on keeping me alive."

"But he didn't."

"Yes, he did. That's why we finally left. We had to."

His head stills on her hair for a moment. "Jesus."

She hugs him tighter with her right arm. "Because if I could have been killed, then obviously I could never help him."

"'Cept you still don't know if you could help Jacob, right? I mean, if you wanted to?"

"Well..."

"What?"

Juliet smiles against his chest. A sinister smile that almost makes her stomach twist. "Alice might have made a mistake last night."

* * *

**So, I uploaded this and the previous chapter as one MASSIVE chapter, but I just broke them up for readability. If you're so inclined to leave a review on both of them, though, you'd make me ever so happy. Reviews are like crack to fanfic writers! :)**


	70. Parentheses

_"Pure white light...was more like a fist slammed against a countertop, and her body was a cup on the counter, jumping with each slam."_

- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

- FLASHFORWARD (STUCK IN 1923) -

Joe's mother comes back from the creek utterly expressionless, but she obviously notices the way he's craning his neck, trying to get a view of the blond woman filling pails. "Was that...?"

"It's not anybody," she says flatly.

He looks at her then, tries to match her, poker face for poker face. They have a little standoff among the trees. (It reminds him of that day when he was little, at the chicken coops in the man in black's camp.) "Don't call yourself nobody," he finally replies.

His mother narrows her eyes at him. "How much do you know, exactly?"

"Why, how much do _you_ know?"

"Not much," she says airily.

"Yeah, me neither."

They look at each other for a long moment. He gives in first. "So, what now?" Joe asks.

"You're asking _me_ what now?" She rolls her eyes at him, smiling, but notices how he waits, patiently, calmly. Just like her, the way she waits until people grow so uncomfortable with the silence that they just start talking again, giving away too much. And this time, he wins. "It's November 14, 1923," his mother tells him. "Give or take a day or two. You know what happened in November 1923?"

"Um... yeah," he admits.

"So you know I'm about to be banished from Jacob's side for the next few months - which means wandering around in the jungle isn't exactly a good place for me right now. Does anyone know you in the time travelers' camp yet?"

"Well, yeah, but there are a couple natives in that camp and they're gonna know, I mean, they're gonna think, well..." His stomach twists. _God, this is awkward._ He hates to bring his mother's loyalty into this. (She's damn touchy about it to this day.) "That you're on the other side."

She barks out a harsh laugh for a moment and looks away. When she looks back, her face is crumpled into an expression he doesn't recognize. "Why are you on Jacob's side?" she asks him softly. "Do you know... Do you know what these people are fighting for?"

Joe nods.

"So... why?"

"Don't you remember how they treated you in that camp?" he tries. "Why would you want to be on Jacob's brother's side?"

She shrugs.

"Nice answer," he says.

Her gaze is unfaltering. "I'm still waiting on one from you."

He hesitates. (Is he supposed to tell her? In his present, in what his mother sarcastically called his "pre-island briefing," she'd told him he could decide for himself. But should he? Is he supposed to?) His mother here, now, tilts her head at him, waiting.

"Why are you on Jacob's side?" she asks again, even more quietly this time.

He swallows hard. "Because you told me to be."

She stands very still, absorbing this. "Were you supposed to tell me that?"

"I don't know. It's the truth, though."

She laughs without looking a bit happy. "So do you have any suggestions on how we're supposed to get back, or what?"

"We can talk to the people at the travelers' camp. Thing is, it's not that simple. All the keyholders are in the natives' camp. If we can't get you back in the next day or so, we're gonna be screwed for seven or eight months. Unless time just decides to send us back on its own."

"Is that likely?"

"Possible, yes. Likely, no."

She tilts her head, clearly debating with herself. "I have a key," she finally says.

"You... have a key."

"Yeah."

"And... were you gonna tell me about this any time soon?"

"I figured, why blow my cover if I didn't have to?"

He's not even sure what he's hearing. "Wait... You're a keyholder?"

"Well, I have a key, so I guess you could call me a keyholder."

"You're not though, are you? Not really." (Jesus fucking Christ, she has that missing key they've been wondering about.)

"Let's put it this way, I have a key."

"That wasn't in the notebooks."

"I don't know what notebooks you're talking about. But you probably wouldn't want to see everything I would put into a notebook."

He's uncomfortable because he knows she is. "Ma..."

"Do you know anyone who would put us up for the night? It's going to be dark soon, and it's a long way to the station."

"Yeah. Hang on." He slides his satchel off his shoulder. "I think I have something in my notes about where we're supposed to go while we're stuck in 1923."

"Seriously?"

"What, you think I don't have my shit together?" He thunks the satchel to the ground, pulls out the notebook he'd made for himself based on his mother's own copious notes. At least, the parts that hadn't been ripped away or blacked out. "OK, let's see... Oh, now _that's_ weird."

"What?"

"So the person I was taking you to see? He's who we stay with while we're stuck in 1923."

"And who's that?"

"Daniel Faraday."

"Daniel Faraday," she repeats in disbelief. "He's _here_?"

"Yeah, I guess so. According to this" - he stabs a finger at the page - "he doesn't really move back to the island until I come in 1925. But for some reason he's here now. I remember reading that, just forgot. Sorry. He's taking a long weekend, you might say." She looks at him incredulously but he just keeps talking. "Hmm... Maybe 'cause time seems to like to crumple in on itself around now? Remind me to ask him about that. Oh, never mind." He pulls out a pencil and scrawls a note to himself in the margin. (He's gonna have to watch himself though - the way he talks to himself sometimes it's like he's a Faraday-in-training, and he'll be damned if that ever comes to fruition.)

"Jonah?"

"It's not your Daniel, Ma. Not the one you knew. It's - Dan, he's... Well, I studied under him at MIT. I guess you could say he's sort of... my boss."

"Your boss."

"Yeah."

"So he's... old?"

"Coming from 2042. I'd watch it who you call 'old', though."

His mother is shaking her head in amazement or disbelief or both. "I thought he was dead. I guess maybe not."

She doesn't even know about the reset. Well, crap, now he feels even worse, what with her left out of something that she herself created. Stuck here all these extra years with not much to go on. "I don't know about that," he finds himself lying for no good reason, "but he's alive and well and I guess he's got an extra tent."

- END FLASHBACK -

"Whaddya mean, Alice made a mistake?"

Juliet twists her face up toward James, but stays very still otherwise. "The fact that she showed up here means there's still something I can do for Jacob off-island."

"Somethin' you can do for..."

"James, I'm tired. I think I need to get some sleep."

"Convenient timin' there, don't you think?"

"Funny, isn't it?" She offers up a half-smile. (If it weren't for the red around her eyes he'd think she was telling him what she made for dinner.)

* * *

He opens his eyes in the morning to find her staring at the wall. "How you feelin'?"

Juliet drags her glassy eyes over to him. "Awesome," she says dryly. Her lids drop closed again and he realizes he's slept longer than he'd thought on that squashy little cot; there's an untouched breakfast tray on the table by Juliet's bed (she will never drink orange juice again) and the nurse must have already been in to drug her up again.

"Can you find someone who will let me go home already?" she mutters into her pillow. "All I ever want is to go home."

When she doesn't wake up in two hours, he goes out to the deli at the corner, gets himself some breakfast and a Miami Herald. Sits there for a few minutes, waiting for his coffee to cool, doing the crossword with a blue felt-tipped pen he borrows from the cashier. Wonders what she'll be like after last night. If she'll just pretend nothing happened.

He's distracted for a moment, noticing a woman at the checkout wearing black running pants just like Juliet's favorite pair, although black running pants are black running pants, right? This woman has a yellow jogging stroller expertly wedged between the counter and the nearest table. There's a baby in there (obviously), maybe about six months old (but then he knows almost nothing about babies). The kid's managed to pull off one of his little red socks and is jamming the toes of his right foot into his mouth.

And Jesus Christ, what the hell are they thinking, trying to have a baby in the middle of this insanity? And maybe the worst part of it is they both know it's insanity. He also knows if he even questions it, she'll just immediately backtrack and say he's right, it was a stupid idea and that will be that. But he doesn't want it to just be..._ that_. He wants them to have a real fucking chance, and don't they deserve that?

(And did Jonah ever pull off his socks and stuff his toes in his mouth? Did Clementine?)

As the woman passes by, the baby's sock finally falls out of the stroller, and he leans down to pick it up without thinking, makes eye contact with the mom. "Thanks," the woman says gratefully, and he nods, and she stuffs the sock in her pocket, obviously knowing if she bothers to put the sock back on the baby's foot, he'll just pull it off again. (And what about the things Juliet would never have thought to remember, would never think to tell him now?)

Crossword filled in, he orders scrambled eggs and provolone on whole wheat toast for her, and a decaf raspberry tea to go.

He finds her awake in her hospital room, standing at the sink, trying to wash her face one-handed. "Hey now," he says, struggling to put down his coffee, her tea and breakfast, the newspaper and the pen (shit, but he forgot to return it). "Shoulder still botherin' you? You need some help there?"

Juliet turns slightly and waves her right hand at him dismissively, not opening her eyes so she won't get soap in them. "No, I just figured, I'm right-handed, why bother with extraneous details like a left arm."

"Don't go thinkin' you're more highly evolved than me or some shit just 'cause you only need one arm."

"Wouldn't dream of it. So where'd you go?"

"Had to go down and defeat the Herald's shitty crossword. Got you some breakfast too. Eggs and provolone on wheat."

"What, no bacon?"

"Called the boy and he said no can do."

She smiles a closed-mouth smile, her eyes still shut. Bends to rinse her face.

He asks while she's still rinsing away the soap, unable to interrupt him. "How come you never told me about Alice?"

She splashes her face with water one last time, dries it slowly with a towel, folds it back over the rack. The whole time he's just standing there like a jackass (with his stupid cold coffee and her stupid decaf tea and his easy stupid boring crossword in a stupid newspaper he probably won't bother to read and his stupid stolen pen), waiting waiting waiting for her to answer.

"Sometimes it's just easier not to talk about things," she finally says.

"I'm gonna call bullshit on that."

She narrows her eyes, but he can see behind it all though, can see how she's trying to lie to herself, trying to tell herself to believe her own words. "It happened and now it's over."

So, yeah, he gets what she's trying to do. Understands it exactly - because how many millions of times has he done this exact same thing? Pushed away the truth stubbornly like an unexpected bill in the mail. (Maybe she even picked up this trait from _him_ of all people, somewhere along the line.) But it doesn't keep away the sudden anger. "_How's_ it over? We're standin' here in the middle of a damn hospital room, for Christ's sake!"

Juliet just watches him, expressionless, that eerie calm having overtaken her face even before he got all bent out of shape. She looks tired; the bruise on her face darkened somewhat yesterday; the marks on her throat are starting to turn yellow at the edges. She moves toward the bed and he bids his own gentleness to return (and sometimes he still is Sawyer and then mostly, he hopes, he's James), and he helps her ease down against the pillows, not missing the way she closes her eyes briefly in pain. (He would wring Alice's own neck if he could.)

But then Juliet reaches up, touches his face, and her fingers are so soft and cool against his stubble, and her eyes are open and searching and blue.

"We always talked in Dharmaville," he says in a low voice. (Which is a lie anyway, at least when it came to the last few days there, while he floated around in total denial, and she in terrified silence. And she knows it as well as he does.)

She turns her face up to him, smiling just a little, recognizing his lie. "Maybe we weren't as messed up back then as we are now."

(And he has no idea what they're talking about anymore, or what he's even supposed to say.) Juliet reaches up again, her hand on the back of his head, and pulls him down to kiss her. When his lips are against hers, his frustration and doubt manage to disappear, and it doesn't even matter they're in a damn hospital room, at least for the moment.

When they finally break apart, he leans his forehead against hers, the fingers of her right hand still twined in his hair. "You need a haircut," she tells him.

"Story of my life, sweetheart. Whaddya say you eat your breakfast and I find out how long 'til I can bust you outta this prison?"

She runs the tip of her tongue against his lower lip (far too suggestively for someone who's still as banged-up as she is). "I'd say that's a damn good idea."

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	71. At Least That Makes One of Us

_"It was unexpected, like finding oneself at work on a weekend. What was I doing here?"_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

On her third morning back at Rachel's, Juliet wakes up in the early-morning dark with James pressed up against her back, and she wonders if this is her chance. She slips away from his warmth, grabs a bathing suit and yesterday's clothes and dresses as quietly as she can.

Juliet goes downstairs without turning on a light, and finds Rachel's car keys because this time she's not up for the walk. So she drives to the beach. Walks across the sand. Reaches the edge of the same dock as last time, in July. Last time she dove. This time she sits on the edge of the weathered wood, eases herself off the edge until she falls and the water closes over her head. The shock of the cold makes her open her eyes.

_Back again, I see._

_You don't see._

_I suppose not._

_What do you think you're doing._

_Nothing without you._

_I need this to end._

_That's funny. So do I._

_I still don't know what you want me to do._

_Pity._

_But I can still do something, can't I._

_Obviously._

_How can we let all those people die._

_Because then it would be over._

_It's not right._

_Since when did you ever care about right._

_I care. We can't let all those people die._

_Then you really have two problems, don't you._

_I need this to be over._

_So make it end._

_How can I make it end. I thought you were the one who can make it end._

_It only ends once. So you better figure out it._

_Meanwhile you're the one who can wait forever._

_Sorry I had to renege on my little survival promise to you._

_No you're not._

_No I'm not. You're right._

_I'm not, either. It got me off the island._

_And yet, here you are._

_Is my son still there._

_In what time._

_You know I'll never help you if it will hurt him. When I turned that wheel, I pushed all the time travelers into this present, didn't I._

_You did._

_Are they still there. Right now._

_How would I know._

_You would know._

_And I thought you would remember._

_Remember what you wanted me to do._

_Exactly._

_Then why don't I._

_Weren't you the one with the little tirade about not wanting to remember things. Before you picked up that shiny black rock._

_Either you or your brother has a terrible sense of irony._

_I'd like to think we both do. But he got to you in ways I couldn't._

_I still don't understand why you just can't tell me._

_Just wait a little longer. I have a good feeling about all this._

_Then at least that makes one of us._

------ FLASHBACK (STUCK IN 1923) ------

Daniel Faraday's tent was a little ways from the rest of the time travelers' camp. Juliet saw him before he saw them; he was hunched toward his campfire in the fast-fading light, writing in a notebook (of _course_; these people would shrivel and die without their fucking notebooks) with the aid of a -- what else? -- battery-operated flashlight.

He turned his face up as they approached; his hair was cut short and threaded with gray. There were some lines on his face, and a nick in his forehead from something or other, but the deep brown eyes were just the same.

"Juliet," he breathed.

"Daniel." Her smile was almost involuntary. Six years, and this was the first time since Jughead she'd seen anyone here she'd known from before -- at least, anyone she'd _wanted_ to see.

"You're so young," he said, smiling, standing, and she laughed at the absurdity of it all, and hugged him tightly.

Jonah stepped forward when they broke apart. "Sorry for showing up a little early, boss."

Daniel chuckled. "A couple _years_ early is probably a record. And here I've been waiting for you nonetheless."

"And you and I might have to have a little talk," Juliet told Daniel pointedly. "What were you doing dragging my son to this island?"

"I'm gonna have to, ah, decline to answer that," Daniel said, a little too seriously for Juliet's liking.

Jonah rolled his eyes. "Don't you guys think this is getting a little too... business-oriented? Come on, Dan, what do you have to eat? I'm starving."

They cooked dinner over the campfire, letting the quiet settle in around them -- as much as it could, anyway, since they weren't all that far off from the travelers' camp, and the travelers seemed to be having a pretty raucous night. They'd obviously hooked up a portable music player to that generator of theirs, and strains of music sometimes carried over to the three of them. The travelers seemed to be alternating between Geronimo Jackson, The Eagles, and some genre of music that Juliet was pretty sure she'd never heard in her life.

But why, if she had to be stuck temporarily in any time, why _exactly_ it had to be now, November 1923, another way of testing her, of checking up on her, to see if she could stop things that she wasn't even going to try to stop. Another test and another instant failure. Juliet was lost in her thoughts for long enough that she didn't stop to wonder whether their silence was actually an awkward one until she looked up and saw Daniel and Jonah exchanging a glance. "What?"

"Nothing," Jonah said.

"I know you're not supposed to tell me anything, all right? So I'm not going to ask." Last thing she needs is to get her son in trouble with (_God this is so weird_) his boss.

"Thanks."

So instead they drink a little too much Dharma rum. They actually have plastic cups to make it all a little bit more civilized than chugging straight out of the bottle. "And really, I don't even want to know where this came from," she said.

Jonah smirked at her. "Good, 'cause we're not telling you."

Daniel examined his cup in the firelight, furrowing his brow in that over-exaggerated way she recognized, even all these years later, as his drunk face. "If liquor's better when it's been aged, what do you think going back in time does to it?" he pondered.

* * *

In the morning she emerged from an overheated green L.L. Bean tent to find her son going through a plastic Rubbermaid cooler. Seeing this stuff around here never ceased to be bizarre for her. Meanwhile, Jonah grinned at the way she was squinting in the light. "Hung over?"

"I haven't exactly been living it up here all these years, so let's just say my alcohol tolerance is a little low."

He winked at her. Another one of James' mannerisms popping out at her. "Don't worry, I'll get you up to speed before you hit the real world."

She put a hand to her forehead, partly to shield the light from her eyes, partly to gauge the throbbing at her temples. "You know, if we keep drinking like this, I'm really gonna be the worst mother ever."

He held out a bottle of water and a granola bar. "You about ready to get this show on the road?"

"Yeah."

"You know how to work the station, right?"

Her heart skipped a beat. "What? No. I thought you did."

"Nah, I do, it's just -- you know we need two people, right? Let me go wake up Dan." He turned toward the tents. But... wait. Two people. What about that didn't seem right to her? _Two people._ Her knees shook; she reached out to grasp the nearest tree trunk. Her plastic water bottle slipped from her hand.

_She sat on the ground, her back against the wall of the station as the air around her wavered pale white. She looked up, worried. That was the third time in the past ten minutes. The sun was nearly all the way up and she knew Alice was trying. But the wavering air wasn't a good sign; it was an incomplete flash._

_His body rested on the ground about 20 feet away from her. She'd checked his neck for a pulse after, her fingers brushing the same skin she'd touched just minutes before, looking for his key. The key she was now wearing around her own neck -- not that it was doing a lot of good with an empty arsenal or the doors to the station in which Alice was now trying and failing to turn back the clock on the ruined battle._

_Finally the door to the station opened and Alice stepped out, pale, shaking, sweating. She shook her head. "No good."_

"You know we need two people, right?" Jonah had said just seconds ago.

Alice had never tried. Never. Two people. "No good," she'd said. Juliet remembered the man in black. "Your little friend over there is doing plenty," he'd said. It was all there, right there, a bomb going off in her face. She couldn't breathe.

Now her son was looking at her, his eyes full of concern. "Ma?"

"I don't think Alice is working for Jacob," she choked out, her free hand balled into a fist, the other digging into the tree bark so hard she thought her skin would split. "It's November 15. I think. We need to check with Daniel. I want to change it. I need to change it."

Jonah stared at her in disbelief. "You think Alice -- "

"We have to go. We have to go now. We have to change it." She was rambling now, shaking, this was so unlike her but everything... was everything just a lie? What about the battles she'd fought? Some of them were clearly for Jacob but most others... It wasn't so clear now, or was it? "Alice is going to sabotage the battle. The one that killed half our camp. The one where Christopher's parents -- you remember -- ?"

His face was white. "Yeah. Yeah, I -- why do you think Alice -- why wouldn't I know -- "

"I don't know. I don't know." Her shaking was almost uncontrollable. Everything made sense now. Everything. She braced her hands against her knees. This wasn't happening. But it was. She was gasping for air and her son moved forward to help her, but she waved him off. "Please go wake up Daniel."

* * *

"You can't do this, Juliet," Daniel argued as he hurried after her.

She tightened her grip on the strap of the rifle over her shoulder. "We're going to stop her."

"But time is too unstable here. Trying to change something when you're already in a loop -- it could be, well..."

"Well, what?" she asked without breaking stride. Jonah, tagging after them both, was (wisely, Juliet thought) keeping out of it.

"It could be catastrophic."

She didn't respond, instead remembered Amy's desperate cries over Paul, James telling Daniel, "Well, thanks anyway, Plato, but I'm going over there." But what did she think she was doing? Just yesterday (was that really yesterday?), she'd seen her younger self, refused to help her. In effect she'd killed Nicholas all over again.

Sure, changing things could mean something worse; it could mean she didn't get home after all. It didn't matter. Because she wasn't cold like Alice, right? She couldn't just fucking leave people dead for her own purposes. She'd already done that. She couldn't again. Because if she got off the island, how was she supposed to live with herself, when she'd been given at least two different chances to fix it? How could she live her life off the island, knowing what she'd done, let herself be tricked into, let others do? Looked the other way Alice said or did something that sent a fleeting question through the back of her head, only to push it aside? _My best friend, my best friend._

And now. Time curling in on itself yet again. It was like a personal invitation from the island, tiny grasping hands at her, _do this, come here, fix this_, little backwards whispers, pleading. It had to work, it had to. Juliet had done too many terrible things while she was here, she'd become what they wanted, become what Alice wanted, and whether it was all a trick or all true or a little of both -- it didn't matter. This was her chance to change it. And if she stayed on the island as a result, so be it.

She'd already lost almost everything, anyway. Why not go for broke?

Her footsteps were fast and steady on the jungle floor. The other two trailed after her, uncertain.

------ END FLASHBACK ------

Juliet hadn't taken any medication before this little jaunt, and getting back up on the dock isn't remotely feasible. Even paddling back to shore is excruciating, and she sits doubled over on the sand for a few minutes before slowly getting to her feet.

At least she remembered a bathing suit this time (and there's no way in hell Ben's been watching her again, at least there's that), but a towel would have been nice. She wrings out her hair one-handed, which doesn't really work, pulls on her clothes with an equal measure of pain and difficulty. Drives back to Rachel's. Slowly, counting the stoplights for no good reason except isn't it amazing she is somewhere where there are roads, cars, stoplights?

Of _course_ they're all awake by now. James is at the car before she even turns it off, and he looks both panicked and furious. Rachel is hovering at the door to the house, Brian's shadow evident just behind her. "What the _hell_, blondie?" James blurts out as she opens the car door.

"Just had to get out of the house for awhile."

He stares pointedly at her wet hair. "Didn't know gettin' out of the house at 5 a.m. meant goin' for a swim."

"If you want to talk about this, let's do it without an audience."

James, gaping open-mouthed, follows her into the house. "What the HELL, Jul -- " Rachel starts in immediately, and Juliet flings both hands in front of her, palms up, fingers arched effectively cutting her off.

"Rachel, just -- please, don't. I'm sorry I technically just stole your car, but don't. Just. Don't." Rachel is stunned into silence, she's still not used to this cold and forceful side of Juliet, and Juliet wishes once again she'd never had to develop this other side (this _Other_ side, ha), but wishes are about as valuable as hundred-dollar bills printed on newspaper.

Juliet makes it up the stairs slowly, James right behind her. "You've gotta be kidding me," he says to her back. "How do you know Alice wasn't just gonna -- "

"I didn't," she admits. "I didn't even think about Alice."

They reach the guest room and first things first, she grabs the orange plastic bottle of Vicodin tablets. She'd cut a bunch of them in half yesterday so she could manage to not spend the majority of her time zonked out, but she shakes out a whole one now, dry swallows it. "You're kiddin' me, Jules," he's repeating now. "You gotta be thinkin' about that! What if -- "

"She didn't. I went to talk to Jacob."

"You..." His face contorts and again she feels like a freak of nature, a science experiment gone horribly wrong. The whole thing still makes her feel unbelievably awkward and uncomfortable, isolated. High school science club secretary all grown up and turned into... What, exactly? Could be a sequel to Carrie, maybe.

She shrugs. Looking away._ Freak freak freak freak._ "He's water," she says softly. "Water's everywhere."

"I just never thought... Never occurred to me, I guess." He looks dumbfounded. "What'd, uh... What'd you talk about?"

"Same thing as always, with zero results. We just always end up talking in circles." _Although he was actually a little nicer this time than he normally is_, she thinks. Juliet reaches to pull off her damp shirt, forgets her broken ribs and lets out more of a whimper than she would have liked.

Instantly he's by her side. "Here. Here." And he eases her shirt over her head, smooths her wet hair away from her face.

Juliet catches his hand, rests her own off on top of his, on the back of her neck. "I want to go home, James," she admits. "I don't want to sleep in this room anymore. Can we just go home?"

"You up for flyin' so soon?" The concern in his face nearly breaks her heart. God, the things she's put him through.

"Only one way to find out, right?" She wants to look brave.

"Whatever you want, Jules." With his other hand he's stroking the side of her face and she really, really shouldn't be thinking about sex at a time like this, _and yet_... She hooks her index finger into the waistband of his PJ pants and he raises his eyebrows at her.

"_Whatever_ I want?"

"Didn't you just get outta the hospital or somethin'?" he asks, but grins cockily at her, tugs her closer, wraps his arms around her hips. And she doesn't miss how his hands drop juuuust a little bit below her waist.

"Maybe. But you know, the beds were awfully narrow there. And my husband had to sleep on a cot." She frowns, trying to keep up this innocence charade, and probably failing miserably, especially with the fingertips of her right hand tracing lines back and forth across his lower belly, and it's starting to be delightfully obvious how it's affecting him, considering those are some pretty thin cotton PJ pants he's wearing.

"Thought I was gettin' you undressed so you could take a shower," he smirks at her, and his hands _definitely_ drop lower than her hips, cupping her ass, and she shimmies against him as best she can in her pathetically injured state. It's enough to elicit a small groan from him, though, and she reaches up, pulls his head toward hers for a kiss that starts out slow and sensual, quickly grows heated. "Are you sure you're up for this?" he asks once they break apart for air.

"Only one way to find out," she says for the second time in the past few minutes, and he starts unbuttoning her pants, and that pretty much answers that. They have to be quiet, obviously; it's 6:30 in the morning and moreover, Rachel is probably still stewing downstairs, waiting to give Juliet a piece of her mind; plus, with Juliet's injuries they have to get a little bit, um, creative (not that she finds she really minds...), but the whole thing is a delicious mixture of urgent and delicate and clingy and loving and hurried and sweet. When they're coiled around each other afterward, out of breath and slightly sweaty, she can almost forget about everything else. She is just _here_, with him.

"Why are you always so nice to me?" she finally says, craning her neck to see him. Trying to make it sound like she's teasing him just a little when really she's just unendingly grateful.

"I dunno, somethin' in that whole 'for better for worse' crap." He narrows his eyes mock-threateningly, but strokes her saltwater-damp hair. "Just remember I'm plannin' on havin' my own 'for worse' part, soon as you got yours all straightened out."

She laughs, and her meds have kicked in so laughing doesn't hurt anymore. "Thanks, I can't wait."

(_Just wait a little longer_, Jacob had said.)

* * *

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	72. Rachel

_"If you are sad, ask yourself why you are sad. Then pick up the phone and call someone and tell him or her the answer to that question."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

"Blondie," he tries. "Juliet." Juliet mumbles and rolls over. _Shit, the Vicodin's kicked in._ "Jules, I don't care if you go to sleep, but you gotta get dressed, OK?" He can't lock the door from the outside and all they need is for the kid to wander in when she's naked and half-unconscious at this point. Meanwhile he's sitting on the bed next to her holding a pair of her PJ pants. And purple panties... No, undies. God, Juliet hates the word panties. ("They're just underwear, James. I'm a mechanic, not a stripper," she'd said to him once in Dharmaville. That memory stood out to him mainly because he'd proved her wrong about the not-stripping part within minutes.)

Juliet opens her eyes a fraction of inch and reaches for her shirt, awkwardly tries to pull it on. He reaches out, helps her get dressed. "Remind me not to take any more whole pills, OK?" she murmurs sleepily. "I hate this."

"You need it, it's OK. Sleep is good for ya, keeps you from runnin' laps on the beach or some shit."

She cracks a smile, keeps her eyes closed as she lies down again. "Just never thought about having to deal with broken ribs again."

_What the... ?_ "...Again?"

"You know," she murmurs, half-asleep. "Miles even said so... When I... before I... died. At least I... Least I didn't have to deal with it for... for too long."

His breath catches in his throat; the room seems to hum with an incomprehensible glitter. On the list of Things They Know But Never Talk About, this is somewhere near the top. "Do you... Do you remember?" he whispers. "You remember dyin'?"

"I don't... I don't know," she barely gets out, her eyes shut tight. "I'm gonna... go to sleep for awhile."

All he can do is gently push her to roll over; as counter-intuitive as it seems, the doctors want her lying on her injured side, which only seems to make her shoulder worse, and she lets out a little whimper as her body assents to his attempt to turn her. He pulls the sheet and blanket over her upturned shoulder, smooths her hair away from her face, and her lips twitch in her sleep.

Now to go deal with the other Carlson sister. And this is still all before 7 a.m., isn't it?_ Jesus. _And too early for a beer. He hears the shower running in the master bedroom, which means Brian's wisely escaped this whole mess to get ready for work. Lucky bastard.

He's halfway down the stairs when he hears the angry clattering: Rachel's emptying the dishwasher from last night. And damn if those sisters don't throw around silverware the exact same way when they're pissy.

James leans against the wall just inside the kitchen. Rachel determinedly ignores him. "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin..."

Rachel just cuts him off with a glare. "What is it with you and your nicknames?"

He coughs. "That was actually, uh..." A Star Wars reference. "Never mind."

"What the HELL is her problem?" Rachel bursts out. "You know she did the same exact thing right after she got back?"

"Uh... No. I didn't."

"It's like, she's fine, she's fine, she's _fine_, and then she just goes and does something that doesn't make any fucking _sense_!" Rachel wrenches the glasses out of the top rack. James shoots his hands out before she can slam them down -- damn things look too delicate to handle like that.

"We just gotta be patient with her," he says automatically.

"You act like it's just sooooo easy for you, library man! How do you even -- "

"I don't know," he cuts in gruffly. "I admit it, OK? Sometimes I just don't know. But you know she ain't usually like that. She just gets real defensive."

"But why doesn't she just -- why can't she just talk about whatever's bothering her?" _Oh, please._ Juliet has enough of a hard time doing that with _him_, and he _knows_ about time travel and Jacob and all that bullshit.

"Listen, we both went through hell not havin' her, right? She went through all that, while basically fightin' for her life. And it wasn't just us she lost, y'know. She was there twelve years. You think someone wouldn't make attachments in twelve years? Spend her life with people she loved, whether she wants to admit that or not? She lost a lot of people, not just us."

"She needs to be in therapy, James. It is NOT normal to go swimming in the ocean, by yourself, in the middle of the night! It isn't even safe even in good circumstances! And when there's someone out there who wanted to -- _wants_ to -- kill her. And she was _swimming!_ Swimming? With broken _ribs_? What if she couldn't have even made it back to shore? Does she have some sort of death wish?"

"She don't got a death wish."

"Yeah, and what makes you so sure?"

"'Cause a few days back she fought off the person who had a gun to her head? You know she even went through a whole bunch of cancer screenings last fall? 'Cause it runs in the...?"

"Yeah. She told me."

"She don't wanna die, Rachel. It's just sometimes, what's going on in her head ain't always so obvious to us."

"I wish I could be more patient with her," Rachel admits. "I feel like she's always walking on eggshells around me."

That's kinda the way he sees it, too, not that he's going to agree with her verbally. "I wanna tell you somethin'. Somethin' she'll probably never tell you."

Rachel wipes her hands on a dishtowel. "OK?"

He rubs his hand over the stubble on his face. Is he really going to do this? "'Bout the time she was supposed to leave the island... Six months in, y'know? She said she was ready to leave, and -- and her... her boss, he showed her these test results, said they were yours." Rachel's watching him intently, her face unreadable. "He told her you weren't gonna live long enough to give birth, and if she wanted to leave and be with you for the end, she could. But if she stayed... They'd cure you. She didn't know whether to believe him or not -- I mean, who could just cure cancer, right? And he probably wouldn't have let her leave anyway. But she had to take the chance."

Rachel just stares at him, open-mouthed, shocked.

So he continues. "An' I know the cancer didn't really come back, but she just had to take the chance..."

Rachel takes two steps toward the kitchen counter, practically collapses onto a stool. "My cancer did come back," she finally manages.

He feels like his sister-in-law just jabbed a syringe into his chest and told him she'd put a (fake) pacemaker into it. "What are you talkin' about?"

"I lied," she says, shaking her head in disbelief. "That first day Juliet came back, she asked me about the cancer and I said I'd been fine the whole time. I didn't want her blaming herself for leaving in the first place. They -- they actually had my test results? On the island?"

He drops onto a kitchen chair, runs his fingers through his hair. "I dunno, I mean I wasn't there, but Juliet said she saw them. What happened, exactly? _Jesus_."

"I was maybe five months pregnant when they told me the cancer was back. That it was too aggressive, there was nothing they could do, and I needed to start to get my affairs in order." She laughs harshly. "I'm sorry, my _affairs_? What the hell did I have, a bunch of old records and art magazines? And the baby would have been too premature to survive if he'd been delivered then. So I was just being treated for pain at that point. I tried to find Juliet, or that Richard Alpert guy, and couldn't. Obviously."

"Obviously," he echoes. Thinking back on Richard Alpert showing up at Clementine's soccer game. (And by the way what the fuck had that been about? Was it the Alpert from '77? Had he actually seen Juliet, dead? At the bottom of the hole? Or in the crater, if there was one?) He drags his eyes back to Rachel.

She's staring off into the distance. "All I know is that a couple months later, every trace of cancer was gone. They called it a miracle. Maybe it was. I mean... Oh my _God_, James... Juliet's _boss_? The people from the _island_? What could they possibly have done...?"

"I dunno. And her boss, she hated him. Technically, I guess it woulda been _his_ boss who could have done something." _Oh, shit. _Had Juliet killed Ben?

"Something? Something like WHAT? These people can cure cancer?" Rachel's looking at him utterly skeptically now.

If Juliet had killed Ben when he really lead to a cure for Rachel... _Oh, shit. Shit shit shit._ This can't lead to any happy fuzzy feelings for Jules. "I ain't sayin' these people can cure cancer," he hedges. "Just... I'm just sharin' the facts."

"Why'd you tell me that anyway?"

"So you could understand her better. And I'm thinkin' that maybe you two need to talk."

Rachel crosses her arms, props one leg on a rung of the stool. "You think?" she sighs.

* * *

Juliet comes downstairs to find Rachel splayed out on the floor of the living room. Like that first day she was back, when they screamed and laughed and fell over the coffee table. The way they used to lay on the floor of their shared bedroom as children, lights out, playing with the flashlights on the black ceiling, limbs splayed like starfish. Rachel's eyes are closed and Juliet can't tell if she's sleeping or why, exactly, she's just lying here on the floor. "Where is everyone?" she asks, softly enough that it wouldn't wake Rachel if she were sleeping.

"They went to the beach." Rachel doesn't open her eyes. Juliet stands still, feeling too tall, watching the way her sister breathes lying there on the floor. Juliet feels herself moving forward, pressing one knee to the floor, then the other, and she's on the floor too.

"Jules?"

"Yeah?"

"You know that thing you do where you pretend you're fine about 97 percent of the time and then the other three percent you go batshit insane?"

Juliet closes her eyes too. It seems only fair. "....Yeah."

"I don't think that's really working out very well."

"I don't think so either."

"Can I tell you something?"

She doesn't know why she feels so afraid. "Yes."

"My cancer did come back while you were gone."

Time stops. She feels the struggle in her lungs, the ache on her left side that the medication isn't quite dulling anymore. "No."

"Yes. But I'm fine now. They said it was a miracle. I'm sorry I lied."

Because Rachel's not looking at her, she feels like she can cry. She's not sure she's cried in front of Rachel since that first day back, in the kitchen in this house. Her eyes are closed tight, but she feels the flood, and her eyelids twitch and the first tears run hot and sticky down the sides of her face. "No. No, no it couldn't -- "

Rachel's hand finds hers on the floor, and their fingers lace automatically. "James told me about the deal you made."

She tries to sit up abruptly, angrily, but Rachel tightens her grip. "Why would he -- "

"Because he did. It doesn't matter. Lie down, would you? You're blocking the sun."

She complies. "This floor is really uncomfortable."

"Too bad," Rachel replies, trying to sound tough even though she's crying too. "Jules, I don't know if they lied to you or told the truth or what. And I don't really even understand what exactly anyone could have done. But if it's at least partially true, thank you. And I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry."

"I'm the one who should be sorry, Rach. I never should have left you."

"No -- "

"You know it's true. Even if everything had worked out and I'd come home in six months. It was so stupid. Richard just started taking about how I was special and they all _wanted_ me and I was stupid enough to fall for that. That someone thought I was special, that they wanted me. It was just so pathetic."

"It wasn't pathetic. And you _are_ special. And we _all_ want you. That's why James and I didn't get along at first. Turf wars."

Juliet chokes out a laugh. "I"m sorry, Rachel. I thought about you every day. Sometimes I couldn't remember your face, and that scared me worse than almost anything. I'm just -- I'm so sorry." Before she knows what she's doing, she's telling Rachel about September 22, 2004, the day she saw Rachel playing with Julian at the park on Mikhail's monitor, the way she touched that screen and screamed at Ben, and she's crying as hard now as she did that day.

Rachel squeezes her hand through it all. Tells her about the day the doctors finally suggested hospice care for her, how her friends threw her a baby shower at her bedside even though there was almost no chance of that baby being able to use any of those gifts. She tells her about the day she went home from the hospital and sang "Downtown" to an empty apartment. The day Julian was born and she didn't know how to take care of him because she'd never thought she'd get that far.

Juliet tells her how she learned to fight. To use a gun. How blue and gray Goodwin's face was that day Ben brought her down that grassy slope. The way she screamed James' name in the jungle. How she wondered for years if he was safe, if Miles and Jin were. What it was like sometimes to not even have soap or shampoo. That her first dislocated shoulder wasn't her last. The way Nicholas' skin felt under her fingers when she slipped the key from his neck. How fucking amazing an apple or a cheeseburger can actually taste. Having to explain to Jonah why his best friends' parents were dead. The way Alice laughed at her when there was absolutely nothing funny left about anything.

Sure, she leaves out time travel and Jacob and his brother and being dead for awhile and exactly how many murders she's actually committed. But it's enough. It's more than enough.

And Rachel is listening, and Juliet is talking. And what's amazing is that Juliet can still be amazed by some things, like how lying on a hard wooden floor with cracked ribs can be the best possible way to spend an afternoon.


	73. It Was a Stupid Plan

_"I felt the foundation begin to shake, and in my head I said, Run."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

------ FLASHBACK (1923 / 1998 / 1992 / 2001 / 815 / 2016 / 1925) ------

She was half-running through the jungle, the other two behind her. "What does your notebook say I already did?" she asked her son over her shoulder.

"It doesn't say," her grown-up Jonah admitted, dodging around a tree branch.

"Can you both just hold up for a second?" Daniel said. Juliet slowed but didn't stop; Daniel rummaged through his bag and pulled out a battered green notebook, the cover crumpled and faded.

"Can you people ever do anything without notebooks?" she demanded.

"Aren't you the one who asked?" Daniel retorted.

"Look, we're the science team," Jonah said. "You're medical, weaponry and connection with the supernatural."

"Oh, is that all?" she threw over her shoulder. "You know, I used to be a scientist, too."

Jonah caught up with her, patted her arm condescendingly. "That's nice, Ma, but nobody's trying to get pregnant."

"Am I going to do something catastrophic or not?" she retorted.

"That, ah, depends," Daniel said. "Sometimes you do and sometimes you don't."

"...What?"

"Ma, there's no finite number of us in the universe," Jonah explained to her over-patiently. Come to think of it, his patience was a little bit annoying, and she stepped up her pace again. "Think about it. To us, you already did whatever you did. But to _you_, you haven't yet, right?"

"Sure."

"Let's say, in theory, you provided information to us."

"OK?"

"Let's say, in theory, you provided notebooks."

She started to laugh. "Now you're just trying to turn this around on me for mocking you guys about the notebooks."

"Show her, Dan."

Daniel hurried forward, and she stopped walking long enough to take the notebook. "Open it," Daniel breathed.

She moved her eyes from Daniel to Jonah and back again, then flicked the cover open. The pages were yellowed and creased, the pencil marks blurred and somewhat faded. But that was her handwriting. That was _definitely_ her handwriting. "Wh..." She couldn't get the word out.

"Look at the dates on the entries."

In the margins were dates, written in the same format she'd dated her notes all through college and med school and her fellowship and lab research. She flipped through the pages haphazardly until about halfway, through when the writing changed to a different script, frazzled and loopy (probably Daniel's) in blue ink. All the dates in her handwriting were between October and November 2013. "Oh my God." Her mind was officially blown. "This is -- I wrote this. Only, I haven't written this yet."

"But to our, ah, perspective, you wrote it thirty years ago." Daniel reached his hand out, and she gladly handed back the green notebook like it have burned her if she'd held it a second longer. "You came to see me over Thanksgiving that year. It'll be a few months in the future for you, if nothing significant changes."

"Speaking of that -- " Juliet spun and started walking again, picked up the pace again. "We're talking while we're walking, come on." Jonah heaved an over-exaggerated sigh. "And no whining, buddy."

"Oh, jeez, Ma," he said sarcastically. "OK, here's the deal. So you'll write your notes, give them to Daniel -- in effect, to _us_ -- and we get them and come back here. And then based on what happens, you'll write your notes, and give them to us. And we get them, and come back here. And then based on what happens, you'll write your notes... Are you following me yet?"

"Oh my _God_." This was utterly bizarre, and yet it made perfect sense at the same time. "But, yes."

"Yeah. Simple time loop. At least, if we're lucky."

"So what does that notebook right now say happens?"

"You don't change anything. Time goes all wonky on us, and you don't change the outcome of the battle, you don't get to warn anyone."

"Do I ever?"

"How should we know? To our perspective, this is the first time we're living through it, in this consciousness. To yours, too."

"Did either one of you ever consider a different career path? Something calm and normal?"

"Right, because resigning one's life to research in a lab is always guaranteed to result in a simple, quiet life."

"I really don't want to tell my only child to shut up, but _seriously_?"

"Yeah, yeah," Jonah replied.

Daniel hadn't said anything in awhile, and awkwardly she wondered if they were walking too fast for him; they were really half-running. Jesus Christ, he was in his mid-sixties. She tried to slow her pace a little. What the hell was he doing here? Did Daniel know her, in the future? Jonah obviously got off the island with her, but... was she still alive, when they were coming from? Daniel had said she looked young. Should she even be wondering about this now? She dragged her mind back to Alice, the ruined battle, the time station.

"Malum consilium quod mutari non potest," she finally said, and Jonah laughed.

"What'd she say?" Daniel asked. (He didn't speak Latin? _But this is all in his blood.... J_uliet felt a strange pang of alliance toward her people for a moment. Her people. Ha. Her people, the ones she was always trying to deny were hers.)

Jonah smirked. "She said, it's a bad plan that can't be changed."

"Does anyone know either of you in the natives' camp yet?" she asked them.

"No. Don't think so," Jonah said.

"So you can't go." She frowned. "We need to find Richard."

"You can probably go," Jonah pointed out. "You have about two days before you're exiled, right?"

She paused. "Do either of you have a pocketknife?"

"What for?"

"My hair. It's too long for 1923."

"You're gonna cut your hair?" he asked incredulously.

"No, I'm gonna cut half my shoelace off and tie _up_ my hair." She rolled her eyes. "Men!"

Daniel handed over a pocketknife; she did as she'd said, re-laced her shoe carefully and wrapped her hair into a bun before tying it up. "You don't have to do this, you know," Daniel said.

"Yeah, I kinda do."

She stepped into the clearing cautiously; she didn't remember seeing her other self here two years ago, so that was something at least. _Oh, no._ Elspeth was sitting there, right over there, reading to her son Chris. And little Jonah. Oh God, those boys were so little. Chris was too little to lose his mother. Her heart fluttered. Better to talk to someone else -- but Elspeth looked up and saw her. "I thought you were at Cecelia's funeral," she said, confused.

"I -- I had to do something for Richard first," Juliet said, stammering a little more than she would have liked. She approached on weak knees. "Have you -- have you seen him?" Jonah was already reaching up for her, and she picked him up, planted a kiss on his forehead. He'd been so much lighter two years ago. And Chris was so much smaller too. That boy -- he could have been her son; instead, he'd been grabbed away from her by an angry mob, and was later taken in by a couple she didn't know very well. He seemed to be doing all right, though, in 1925. He and Jonah were playing together again these days.

"Hmm, I haven't seen Richard in awhile," Elspeth said.

Juliet shifted Jonah to her other hip. "Elspeth, listen to me. Someone's going to come get you tonight, wanting you to go into battle. Whatever you do, do NOT go. I'm serious. Don't go."

Elspeth's lips parted slightly; she shook her head in confusion and then understanding. "Are you in a loop?" she gasped.

"In this case, just plain old time-traveling. It doesn't matter. Just listen to me, Elspeth, whoever wants you to go, _you don't go._" Elspeth was nodding her assent when Juliet felt the pressure behind her eyes, in her lungs, and she was pulled forward this time instead of backwards. The last thing she saw was Elspeth lunging forward to catch Jonah as Juliet disappeared.

When she could breathe again, their village was gone, nothing but a slight impression in the clearing, which wasn't even so clear anymore. Jungle growth had filled in quite a bit, and she spun to her right; through the foliage she could barely make out Jonah and Daniel getting to their feet. She crossed over to him.

"Well, this is just great," Jonah said.

"I told Elspeth not to go to the battle," she whispered.

"Christopher's mom?"

"Yeah."

Jonah pauses. "Did she die? To you?"

"Yeah. Not to you?"

"I don't know. I think she did."

"You don't know?" she pressed.

"I -- "

"We can talk later," Daniel interrupted gently. "I think the best thing to do is find the underground station, get back to where we should be -- I mean, not where we _should_ be, but you know, 1925 -- or, 1923 -- ah, no, _you _two should go to 1925 and I'll go to 1923 and leave the island from there -- or maybe I should go to 1925 since I'm supposed to be there later and could just save myself the trip..."

"Check in your green notebook," Juliet suggested, and he lapsed into silence, shuffled through the pages. Finally he looked up and nodded. "1923. If possible."

They started walking again. They'd gotten maybe two miles before anyone spoke again. "I wonder what year we're -- " Jonah began before a sharp whipping sound hissed through the air. The next thing Juliet knew, she was crammed up in a net with the two of them, swinging back and forth, looking at the jungle upside down.

"You just HAD to say something, didn't you?" Daniel retorted.

_Good one,_ Juliet thought approvingly. "So, somewhere between 1988 and 2004," she surmised.

"The Frenchwoman?" Jonah asked warily. "Is she gonna electrocute us or something? Because I read... Oh, right. DUH. Pocketknife."

The three of them shifted around so Daniel could reach into his pocket. It would be funny if it weren't ridiculous. _The Three Time-Traveling Stooges,_ Juliet thought as Daniel set to sawing through the ropes, and _At least I get to be Curly_, and she started to laugh, which really was an insane reaction to their predicament.

She probably would have stopped laughing once they hit the bottom, but between the sky and the ground, different problems popped up. She felt them being pulled backwards again, and before she made contact with the jungle floor, she realized she couldn't breathe or see. Her eyes filled with tears, burning; she was choking and gasping for a breath that never came, coughing so hard she thought her throat was bleeding. Just as her vision started to completely black out, they were pulled forward again. She thought she was still on the verge of passing out when she realized, simply, that it was night. The three of them lay coughing and gasping on the ground for a long time. Finally, she managed to pull out her canteen, took a long sip of water and passed it over. She wiped her burning eyes, her bloody nose, trying to focus on the twitching tree branches and bright stars overhead.

"What the hell was that?" Jonah finally choked out.

"I think we just survived the Purge, buddy."

"Fantastic," Daniel muttered.

They got to their feet cautiously; Juliet could tell from their body language that they were both expecting to be pulled into another time again immediately, just as she was. They moved an an uneven circle, surveying their surroundings. "Everything looks OK," Juliet said uncertainly.

"Odds that we're in a time that the underground station is operational?" Jonah asked, raising an eyebrow.

Daniel shrugged, and Juliet found herself cringing. Did she set this all into motion by warning Elspeth? Did she actually change something? She hadn't warned Richard about Alice; she hadn't stopped the battle. That's what she'd been intending to do, would have done if she'd had the time.

They started walking again, only to hear voices carrying through the woods. Juliet automatically yanked Jonah down behind a bush with her; he was over six feet tall and 34 years old, but he was still her son and her protective-mother nature didn't care about those things. Daniel ducked behind a tree nearby. Juliet thought of that night she'd hid with James, him asking her "These your people?" and her response: "Want me to go out and ask them?" Odd how the island loved bringing certain things full-circle.

But then those voices got a little closer: Ben and Ethan were tramping through the jungle; Ethan was holding up a turning torch and Ben had his same stupid satchel as always. They were talking about -- _oh for fuck's sake... _They were talking about Miami, Ben bitching about why Richard had said he wasn't meant to go, that only Richard and Ethan would go, and her face froze into an impossibly bitter grimace she couldn't avoid hiding from her son. She sensed Jonah watching her, and she gritted her teeth, willing Ben and Ethan to pass by without noticing them.

(Couldn't they ever manage to end up somewhere uneventful?)

Finally their voices went silent, and Jonah swiveled slightly toward her. "Ever feel like the island is just fucking with you?" he whispers.

She covers her mouth to hide her smile. "Every damn day." Daniel approached them then, his footsteps quiet on the soft ground. "Should we keep moving or camp for the night?" she asked him. It was weird, she was treating him like an elder.

Daniel hesitated. "If we camp for the night, we could lose our chance. End up in a time when there's no station."

"Good point," she murmured. She needed someone else to call the shots for awhile; her head ached; she couldn't tell anymore if it was one of her typical headaches or a result from all this involuntary time travel. "Are we supposed to have headaches when time collapses? Like we do with the white flashes?"

Jonah and Daniel exchanged a glance. "Not... necessarily," Daniel hedged.

"Perfect," she muttered, pressing a hand to her forehead.

At the doors to the station, she pulled out the long leather cord, just touching her key to the lock when they were pulled backward, _again, _dammit, and poof! No more station. "Sonuvabitch!" she growled out, and she didn't miss the look Jonah gave her at that.

"Well, guess we get to sit around and watch grass grow for awhile," he said.

They sat around, waiting for another time change. At dusk, Juliet went out to look for food, returned with an armful of mangos. Jonah built up a fire, tossed her another one of those Dharma granola bars from his bag. Eventually they settled down to go to sleep in the dying embers of the fire. _This could take awhile_, she thought, her worries keeping her awake for longer than her exhaustion would have otherwise allowed.

They spent almost a week like that. She went out to hunt a couple of times, although Jonah insisted he was a vegan-leaning vegetarian. ("Did I really scar you that much?" she asked him; "Yes," he answered honestly.) One of them would occasionally go out scouting; all they could tell was that the statue was still intact.

Every day they grew a little more uneasy. The notebook existed; both Jonah and Daniel had seen her off-island; this mess HAD to sort itself out eventually, right? _Except things change_, was the unspoken chorus among them.

She'd just returned from peeing behind a bush (_ah, classy_) when she felt the familiar tightening in her lungs, behind her eyes, and she fell forward. Her massive surge of relief disappeared the instant she realized she had fallen forward... into water. Juliet choked out a mouthful of saltwater and then it was like she couldn't do anything else, utterly paralyzed by fear. They were in the middle of the ocean. Just... in the middle. She turned, treading water. No land. Did Jacob --

"Holy FUCK!" Jonah hit surface, followed by Daniel.

"What the -- where the fuck did the island go?" she gasped out.

"You're asking _us!_?" Jonah said incredulously.

"I thought you were from the future!" she called out, desperately afraid and wiping the blood from her nose. Not that a bloody nose was really of all that much concern when they were _in the_ middle of the fucking ocean with no land in sight. "Hang on." She ducked under the water.

_Well well well._

_You have to help us._

_Do I._

_Please. Please help us._

_But you never helped me._

_I would if I could, I promise. Where did the island go. What year is this. Are we in a time loop. Is this definite._

_Questions, questions._

_I don't have time for you to act like a hurt child._

_Actually, I don't think you're really in a situation to be telling me how I can or can't act._

_Fair enough. Can you send us back? I'll do anything._

_Yes, apparently you will_.

The tightening behind her eyes, in her lungs, came again, and the three of them were lying, soaking wet, on the dusty ground in front of the station. Jonah and Daniel went down into it, only to come back out and report that they were, in fact, back in 1925.

"Let's try not to do that again," Daniel suggested, swiping away the blood from under his nose.

------ END FLASHBACK ------


	74. Cutesy Little Anagram Names

**This chapter goes out to MadSteph for asking great questions, and eyeon for a suggestion on the notebooks. Thanks! And in case you've been wondering, there are 7-8 chapters to go after this.  
**

* * *

_"I feel the same way."_

_"What do you mean."_

_"That anything's possible."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories" -

* * *

James ditches Nate after first period ends and plugs his index finger into the ear that doesn't have the phone pressed up against it. He's barely been able to pay attention to the damn hockey game worrying about what's going on at home. If Juliet hadn't practically forced him to go, there would have been no way in hell he would have even considered it.

Nate had called him out of the blue last week, and Juliet had arched an eyebrow at James' side of the conversation: "Yeah, me too... Just been really busy... Nah, man, got too much goin' on right now... Maybe some other time... Yeah... K, bye."

"What the hell was that?" she'd asked.

"Just Nate. Had an extra Winterhawks ticket."

"For when?"

"Wednesday night."

She'd paused. "Do you already _have_ plans for Wednesday night?"

"Am I s'posed to have plans?"

"Well, I figured we could talk about my sociology homework, and watch the kids finally win the Acorn Trophy in Mario Kart. Ooh, and load the dishwasher." She'd rolled her eyes. "Go to the game, James. We'll still be here when you get back."

Of course, them _not_ being there when he got back was exactly what he's worried about. James has barely left her except to go to work during the month since they'd returned from Miami. He'd gotten the gig at Emporia State, collections development librarian specializing in literature, and he was trying his damnedest to fit in with the new coworkers, which meant actually speaking with proper grammar and following a whole new ornate structure of doing things.

Then there were his designated shifts at the reference desk, which all too often involved disinterested or lazy or simply overwhelmed students. Truth was, he missed his little book club of incarcerated readers a lot more than he'd thought. And his work buddy Anthony. But the money at the university was so much better, and anyway, James found he actually liked helping the ones who actually wanted to learn (and who knew he'd be good at teaching college students anything?), but mostly he preferred dealing with the older students, like he himself had been, like Juliet was finding herself now.

As for Juliet, she'd easily (obviously) made up her missed schoolwork. She even made a mom friend at her community college; they ate lunch together during their Tuesday/Thursday class breaks, traded middle school carpool horror stories or something. "She decided to go back to school like me. Well... not exactly like me, I guess," Juliet had said. Possibly the understatement of the year.

Her broken ribs were healing well and she'd ceremoniously ditched the pain meds last week (but then there were all those recent nightmares that weren't even about Alice or Jacob's brother, were they?). Sure, there was no way she was ready to get back under a car, maybe in another two or three weeks, the docs had said, so she'd been conducting some mildly successful eBay business hawking vintage car parts. "A Ford sellin' car parts, don't get much more poetic than that," he'd pointed out.

But now as the phone rings, his heart's in his throat, and he thinks this was a really, REALLY bad idea, even if she'd pushed him into it and reminded him about the alarm system and all that crap. "C'mon..." he growls into the phone, and she picks up.

"Halftime already?"

"Ain't halftime when there are three periods, Jules."

"Whatever, I've got more important things to do than watch blood bounce on ice." _Hypocrite_. She's been trying desperately to get Clementine interested in watching WNBA -- they have a great cable package -- although Clem's way more interested in watching the latest season of Glee.

"You guys OK over there?"

"Everything's fine, James."

"Password?" The password thing was an idea James had -- hell, he hadn't spent three years working Dharma security to _not_ consider the possibility of a hostage situation.

"James," she warns, exasperated. "We're fine."

"Password or I'm callin' 911, no joke."

She heaves an enormous (fake) sigh. "Outrigger."

"_Thank_ you. Jesus, was that so hard?"

"Paranoid much?"

"It ain't paranoia if..."_ ...they're really after you_, is supposed to be the end of the phrase, but that hits a little too close to home and he shuts up. "Never mind," he mutters. "Kids OK?"

"I just got Jonah into bed. Clementine and I are gonna get drunk now. Or maybe bake something, we haven't decided yet."

He can't help a patronizing chuckle. "Hell, sweetheart, if I'm gonna come home to sweet treats every time I have a guys' night out..."

"If that's what you're expecting, then you can fix your own car next time," Juliet says in her Fake Polite Voice. And anyway, she's telling him to get a beer and go find Nate and have fun, for crying out loud, they're _fine_, everything's fine, go _on_, so he does.

------ FLASHFORWARD (1925) ------

To Joe, the hike back from the station seems a lot longer than it should. Faraday shuffles off toward the travelers' camp, and Joe and his mother lapse into what, in theory, should be a companionable silence. They're exhausted, and the unsaid things between them hang heavy over them.

They're walking along the creek by the time she finally says something. "You know you took your first steps right over there?" she asks, pointing to a slight clearing.

"Weird."

She smiles a tight-lipped smile. "Yeah."

Then they both try to speak at once. "Go ahead," he says.

His mother runs a hand through her dirty hair. "Did I cause that? The way -- time sort of collapsed on itself?"

He nods. "I think so. I mean, obviously not initially. These things just sometimes happen, and 1923 seems to be one of those places that holds a lot of gravity. But when you tried to warn Christopher's mom, yeah, I..." He shrugs.

Her expression tightens. "I could have killed us."

"But you didn't."

She shrugs, shifts her water-logged and ruined rifle to the other shoulder. At this point it's just window dressing, like their soggy, ink-bled notebooks.

"Had you ever tried to change something on purpose before? I mean, other than the bomb, obviously."

"Wouldn't you know from your notebook?" she asks. Joe doesn't know if it's just because they're tired, but he detects a slight edge in her voice.

"I don't know everything," he mutters. "So?"

"No," she finally says. "I hadn't."

"Listen, when you actually try to change things -- and especially if you're already time traveling -- and _especially_ if you're involuntarily time traveling... time can freak out. And since we're trying to have that _not_ happen, sometimes you have to sort of play along."

She's shaking her head. "But then why did you have to know anything in advance? It seems like the best thing would be to follow the rules and not talk about it. That's what we've been doing for years here."

"I know. And it's kind of paradoxical, too, since the more time travelers who come here, the more unstable time gets."

"Are you people here to fight the war or find an endpoint for the time problems?"

"Both. The people being brought into your camp are mostly for the war. Look, don't get me wrong, I hate the war, but I've had to get them here for it. As for myself, I'm just here for the time issues."

"How noble of you."

"Well, it's all converging, like I said. And we're almost done here. Maybe. Sort of like the last mile of a marathon."

"Or the last mile before Thelma and Louise drive over the cliff."

_Ah, sarcasm will get you nowhere_, but he laughs anyway. "Here's hoping not. At least if we can play it out all right. Otherwise, I'm calling dibs on being Louise."

"Perfect. So why the hell are _you_ here?"

"I already told you, it's my job."

His mother twists up her face. Clearly, she's not buying it. "I see. So you have this job, and you have information from the future -- "

" -- from the past -- "

"It's like you're just reading from a script," she says simply.

_But we're almost at the end._ "We have to do some things the same way on purpose. Time's unstable, and we're trying to trick it into thinking it's stable."

His mother stops walking, stares at him. "That's insane."

"I know," he replies cheekily.

"Doesn't that just make you feel... trapped?"

"Not really." _Not the way you think._

"Well, it would make _me_ feel trapped." She purses her lips, uneasy. Moves her eyes over him, mentally measuring his adult height like she's still not quite sure she wants to believe who he is, that he's really here. She starts to walk again; he follows her, half a step behind like she's still the boss of him.

(He knows what his mother wants to say, and why she's not saying it.)

Instead she increases her pace. "Come on, we've got to find Alice." He's walking behind her but sees how she tightens the fingers on her right hand into a fist.

------ END FLASHFORWARD ------

Later James punches in the code to the alarm system -- _12-31-74_, and Juliet had actually blushed when he'd told her what the code was, even though it wasn't like anyone else would ever know the code or the reason behind it. (OK, as for the reason, maybe Miles or Jin, but still, no biggie.)

He unlocks the door to find her curled up on the couch, dozing; the TV is turned on, low.

James turns to close the door and Juliet stirs. "Hey. Hi," she mumbles sleepily. "What time is it?"

"Little after 11. Smells good in here."

"Mmph." She stretches. "Clem and I made a bundt cake. Lemon poppyseed. She thinks the word 'bundt' is funny."

"It _is_ sorta funny."

"How was the game?"

"Ehh, they lost. And no fights, so no blood bouncin' on ice."

"Was it at least good to get out of the house?" She's more awake now, runs a hand through her hair, smiles at him.

"Yeah, I thought if I had to spend one more night starin' at my hot wife I'd go berserk."

Juliet tries to hide her blush, jabbing a finger at the TV screen. "Have you ever seen this? I don't know how much I missed."

He realizes Donnie Darko is on. "Ah, jeez, Juliet, why are you watchin' this? You know what it's about?"

She counts off on her fingers. "Time travel, death, and as far as I can tell, menacing bunnies. So? I need to figure out if I should DVR this or what."

"What's the last thing you remember?"

"Sparkle Motion went to Star Search. And Donnie and the older sister, I forget her name, decided to have a party."

He watches the screen for a moment. "OK, yeah, you didn't miss that much." He fills her in on the plot. "You wanna keep watching or go to bed?"

She reaches out an arm to him. "Want to watch with me? Like I said, there's cake." _Ahh, bribery will get you everywhere. Except...._

"Let's just go to bed," he says, uneasy for some reason. This movie is too freaky to finish watching, considering the shit they've been through in this life, or the last. Juliet just watches him curiously, her fingers on the remote. He tries another tactic. "Don't we have somethin' we need to, uh, _try_ tonight?" She hasn't been taking her temperature every morning to predict the stock market, after all.

"You mean, the thing we tried this morning and last night?" Her mouth curls into a smile. "I hate to tell you this, but there is such a thing as trying _too_ much."

"An' why's that?"

"Trust me, you don't really want to know."

"Then I'll just pretend I don't." He takes big steps across the room to her, sinks one knee into the couch on the left side of her, and she raises an eyebrow, so he presses his hand gently into her right shoulder, turning her slightly. Her eyes widen as he climbs onto the couch, planting his other knee between hers, and leans into her, rounding his palms over her hips.

Her lips part slightly in anticipation as he angles even closer, and her breathing is just starting to speed up. So he plays sneaky, avoids her mouth and starts dropping kisses against that gorgeous soft skin right where her neck meets her shoulder. "Mmm..." she breathes out. Funny, that's pretty much what he's thinking, too. She tilts her head slightly to give him better access, and the remote clatters onto the floor. Juliet runs her hands up along his sides, under his shirt and across his back; he moves up to kiss her, their lips meeting fiercely, and her fingers dig into the skin of his back.

They reach a point where they're both gasping for air, groping each other like teenagers under half-hanging articles of clothing. "Can we just take this upstairs already?" she groans out as his hand once again sneaks into her pants.

"Thought you'd never ask," he growls into her neck, and pulls her off the couch.

* * *

Maybe it's the dim light, or the fact that he's been thinking he needs a new prescription, but the letters in his crossword puzzle meld and blur together before his eyes. Juliet's still asleep next to him, she's never been into this early-morning business, but he woke up somewhere near 5 a.m. today and couldn't get back to sleep, and when he heard the dull thud of the newspaper landing on the front steps directly below their bedroom window, he'd slipped out of bed, grabbed the paper and a pen. The puzzle's half filled-in and the sun's still not quite up yet.

Juliet shifts slightly in her sleep, curling toward him, her eyelids fluttering in a dream. Nightmares are nothing new to either one of them, considering, but in the month since they've been back from Miami she's had a string of them -- more than a string of them, really -- deeply unsettling, relentless but unspecific. She's woken up sobbing a handful of times. The first time she was shaking so hard she could barely dial Rachel's phone number, insisting on calling her sister right then no matter _what_ time it was, demanding that James check on the kids. Everyone was fine. ("I thought... I thought..." she kept saying, never finishing her sentence.)

Watching her dream peacefully right now is balm on whatever got him up so early today, this general uneasiness and uncertainty buzzing around their lives right now, and he decides maybe he should just quit the damn crossword for now and curl up with her and wait for the alarm clock to go off like normal people do.

He slips off his glasses and moves to drop them on the end table, and that's when his peripheral vision locks onto the crossword still resting on his lap. There's a word jumble puzzle on the same page... clue: "the _____ greatest." The answer apparently consisted of the letters L,I,M,E,T,A and L. Why does that randomly placed set of letters seem so familiar? Lime-metal?  
... Liemstal. The company, the company that covered over for Mittelos.

There's no s in this clue, is there? He looks at the clue again, and knows the answer is "all time." Liemstal: an anagram for "all times."

"James?" Juliet's watching him sleepily and he realizes belatedly that he's been muttering to himself like damn Dr. Twitchy over there at Oxford. "What is it? Don't you ever sleep?"

He holds out the paper to her; her hand snakes out from under the covers and she gazes at it drowsily. "Liemstal," he says. "What if it's an anagram for somethin'? All times. That's what you were sayin', right, they were fightin' the war through all times?"

She's looking at the paper, sleepy but calm and expressionless (sometimes it's amazing to watch her, the way she can fly between two extremes like it's nothing). "For Liemstal?" she finally says. "I'd been thinking something else for that."

"You were -- _what?_" What the hell kind of people were they, solving anagrams at 6:30 in the fucking morning? Shouldn't they be sleeping or screwing or making coffee? This is a damn strange life.

"Yes. Well. Maybe. As if they didn't have better things to do than make up cutesy little anagram names for their front companies."

"But... what else were you thinkin'?"

She frowns slightly. "It doesn't matter. I'm sure if the anagram was intentional, you're right."

"Tell me anyway."

She drops her eyes down. Makes him wait. "Last mile."

* * *

That night they're making dinner when Juliet reaches for the jar of oregano and pauses abruptly, her hand dangling in mid-air, her eyebrows raised.

James pauses from chopping peppers. "Jules?"

She plucks the small jar from the shelf by the sink, turns to him. "I'm an idiot." She looks awfully pleased about it, though.

He pauses in his veggie chopping. "Uh... You wanna clarify that at all?"

"I asked you about Alex and Karl, right?"

"Right."

"Because they didn't die after all, because of the reset."

"...Right?" he prompts.

Juliet rolls her eyes, smiling to herself. "So Goodwin isn't dead anymore."

He pauses. "Oh yeah." The thought had never quite occurred to him, either.

She smiles again, a small contemplative smile. "I don't know why that never occurred to me until just now. I'm -- I mean -- I'm glad he's alive. He shouldn't have died because of me." She shakes her head, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.

"He didn't die 'cause of you, he died 'cause of Ben." She just shrugs, but James suddenly thinks of the people on the island now -- the people who would possibly be there, in this present. If Jacob drowns the island any time soon, it doesn't matter if Goodwin or Alex or Karl or whoever survived the reset. But that would mean Jacob wouldn't drown it in a time when Juliet and Jonah were there. So they should want that, right? No matter how wrong that was, to want?

After a long pause, all she says is, "I wish I could have saved Elspeth... I wish..." She presses her lips together.

What was she going to say? He reaches out, touches the back of her elbow. "You tried."

Juliet nods once, and twists the lid off the jar.


	75. This One or That One

_"It is this way between us; it has always been this way. She has always taken care of me like this."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

Juliet has to admit to herself how simultaneously wonderful and disheartening it is to find herself basically a suburban mom/wife/eBay seller/Swandale Middle School girls' field hockey carpool organizer. She'd survived time travel, she'd survived fighting in a fucking war; hey, at one point she'd even managed to cope with med school well enough to transition into the accelerated MD-PhD program, aided only by massive quantities of coffee and the sad little belief that eventually she'd be able to help people.

So sometimes when she looks out the smeary windows during her Bio 201 lab at Portland Community College and types her fake name at the top of her papers, life just feels a little bit grayer than it should.

Oddly enough, she's found herself wondering what Jack's doing these days, if he really did lose his medical license like Google had implied. She figures James might know, but the subjects of Jack and Kate are on the list of Things They Never Talk About. And anyway, all it really comes down to is that the island is not good for medical professionals.

And her Bio lectures are fucking humiliating. She usually goes to them anyway, out of obligation or to at least know what to expect on the exams, because she's been skipping all the assigned reading. At least physics is challenging enough, and Human Behavior and Social Environment I is pretty interesting. For some reason, though, she sometimes finds herself thinking of Ben during group discussions.

To be honest, the whole thing still seems a little bit surreal. The first day of classes Juliet had slipped into a seat at the back of the room in her sociology class, half-appalled at the fact that she was probably twice the age (at least) as most of the other students. And the professor? Well, it was entirely possible that she was older than him, too. But when she'd glanced along her row, she noticed a woman around her age (dark jeans, layered shirts, awesomely age-inappropriate sneakers -- definitely one of those post-grunge yuppie moms James liked to bitch about), offering an understanding smile. Sandra had introduced herself at the first class break, and Juliet's been finding her fake name rolling off her tongue more easily these days, although it still manages to leave a sad and sour taste behind. Leah. It even manages to sound a little bit like "liar."

The two of them teamed up for a group project and started having lunch together after class. But Sandra doesn't come to campus on Mondays, so today Juliet spreads her stuff out at their usual table in the student union and checks her phone for messages.

Just one missed call, but the number starts with 011. The country code for the United Kingdom. Juliet automatically presses a hand to her forehead. God, she's tired today.

Those dreams have really been running her down lately.

They weren't nightmares, exactly. Not of the sort that she and James were both so used to. Instead, the dreams felt dark and close and intimate, not Alice's warm and threatening breath over her face in the darkness. But cool and swishing, like questions and answers and love and friendship twinned into strands of DNA and then ripped apart. The dreams always carried with them a deep and inherent sense of loss, a loss almost worse than death.

Like the loss of someone she loved, and it was terrifying every time.

The first time she'd woken up from one of these dreams, she'd been practically hysterical, sobbing beyond the point of breathing, calling her sister far too early and demanding that James go check on the kids. Her heart wouldn't stop pounding. It just felt so much like she'd lost something and couldn't figure out what. It just... hurt, hurt like a hand that had been cut off, and she still couldn't identify the source of all that pain. Had something happened to Jonah, her grown-up Jonah, on the island?_ No, please no._

And now here's this 011 number on her phone. Juliet's been worrying about Dan lately, just a bit. Or rather, the entire Daniel Faraday Situation. She'd told herself they'd gone to see Daniel because they need to create an endpoint to the island's time problems. They'd just have to get it done before Jonah grew up and wanted to go to the island... Except... did she actually get Daniel involved in the first place by going to see him? Was this -- whatever happened, happened?

When he'd refused to help her, at first she'd just been depressed and angry. But then she'd started to think, maybe it was for the best. If Daniel just stayed out of it entirely, maybe they'd never solve the time problem... but maybe that wouldn't really end up mattering. Maybe she'd get really lucky and nothing would ever happen. (Or maybe she'd get really _un_lucky and it would turn out she and Jonah got blown up after all, or drowned or who knew what else? Better not to wonder.)

She should never have gone to see him. It was a stupid plan. (Everything's too interconnected and they'll never fucking sort it out anyway.)

So seeing his number on her phone today stabs her with a sharp sliver of fear. A little voice in the back of her head taunts her with, "See, whatever happened, still happens."

Oh, and then there's James. Although she hates to admit it, James' overprotectiveness is definitely wearing on her at this point. On both of them. And the last thing either of them needs is for him to carry another burden. Especially this one.

James doesn't have to know what Jonah will grow up to do, and they can just... What? Live a normal life? Maybe?

What would happen if she just never calls Daniel back?

So she'll just keep discouraging Jonah from science and math and they'll never talk to Daniel or set foot in England again, and Jonah will certainly _not_ fucking go to MIT and that's all there is to it. (One hell of a Variable she's turning out to be.)

Juliet tosses the iPhone back into her messenger bag; it smacks into her textbooks with a hollow, metallic clunk.

* * *

She's back at the house 45 minutes before Jonah's scheduled off the school bus. Clementine's at Cassidy's this week and it's not a field hockey day. The house is clean and the weather sucks. Late February weather. Just as awful as the rest of February weather, and January, and December.

She picks up the remote control from the coffee table. Why hadn't James wanted her to watch the end of that movie last week? Not that she'd minded about the way he'd tried to distract her -- far from it, honestly, but it was pretty obvious that's what he'd been trying to do. But the movie is still saved in their DVR.

So she tucks herself into a corner of the couch watches the end of it, watches as the plots split into different universes, watches the characters lose their memories of their first lives but then... not quite? They sort of still remember, even the dead characters?

Her head clangs with another impossible headache during the last few minutes of the movie, watching a montage of the characters maybe-sort-of-remembering-but-not -- and would that have been better for all of them, here, now, in their own lives? To not remember at all? She can't really see how remembering what it was like to wake up at the bottom of a muddy hole with dozens of broken bones just before dying was really worth it.

Stupid, overly pitiful song in the movie, too.

_And I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad_  
_The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had _  
_I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take  
When people run in circles it's a very, very mad world _

She feels like throwing the remote at the TV, but instead she just clicks it off. What an infuriating ending, no wonder he hadn't wanted her to finish it.

------ FLASHBACK (1925) ------

As they approached her camp she saw Dottie in the kitchen area, and suddenly her thoughts bounced from Alice to her son -- the little one, that was. Dottie was supposed to be watching Jonah -- where was he? She rushed up to Dottie, her grown-up Jonah (she still refused to call him Joe) half a step behind. "Where's Jonah?" she breathed out.

"Oh, Alice took him to the cre -- "

"Where's Richard?" Juliet demanded.

"I haven't seen him in a couple of days, Jules. What's wrong?"

She opened her mouth to tell her, and then realized -- how was she supposed to know who was working for Alice and who was working for Richard? Alice couldn't have been the only double agent, right? "Never mind, just tell him I was looking for him."

Juliet took off running, her grown-up Jonah calling after her, "Ma! Ma!"

"What did she do -- where'd she take you -- "

But at that moment they practically slammed into Alice, who was holding the little Jonah's hand. Juliet yanked him away from Alice, shoved him into the arms of his own grown-up self. Alice was sputtering and protesting, but Juliet just hauled back and punched Alice with everything she had.

Alice stumbled to the ground, her hand flying to her temple. "Bloody hell, Jules, what --"

But Juliet tackled her before she got another word out, throwing another punch. "I know, Alice," she hissed. "I _know_."

Alice struggled to wipe her bloody lip, which wasn't easy considering Juliet was sitting on top of her with the rifle crossways under Alice's chin. She blinked. "Know _what_...? Jules, you're really starting to freak me out."

Juliet turned to ask her grown-up son if he had something to tie Alice's wrists together. But instead what she saw was George from her camp and another man she didn't recognize... with guns drawn on both of her sons. Both versions of her son. However that worked.

"Get off her," George ordered. "Slowly."

"George, Alice isn't working for Jacob. She's -- "

George laughed harshly. "Yeah. I got that. Like I said, get off her. Hands up. Leave the rifle where it is."

Juliet slowly got to her feet, keeping her hands extended. (She remembered those last moments in her yellow house with James, leaving the same way.) "Please let the two of them go. They're not involved. Just me." The other man approached her, his gun still drawn, and put his hand firmly on her shoulder.

Alice started to laugh as she stood. "They would be a pretty decent bargaining chip, though, you'd have to admit."

"You _bitch_," Juliet spit between clenched teeth.

"Hey!" the man-who-wasn't-George snapped, jerking Juliet's shoulder hard.

Alice waved her hand. "Even I'm not that diabolical, no matter what you'd like to believe, Jules. Why don't you ask your boy there? The littler one, anyway."

Juliet darted her eyes to where both Jonahs were. They looked equally horrified, probably for slightly different reasons.

"Where'd we just come from, sweets?" Alice directed at the little Jonah.

"The -- the creek," he stammered.

"What do you want with us?" Juliet asked.

"Oh, same thing I've always wanted. To save this island. Just like I told you all along. Sad, really, that all you've had is time but you could never manage to figure that out. So you're just going to have to come with us, I'm afraid." Alice nodded to George. "Just tie up the other two, leave them here."

"You've gotta be fucking kidding me," George replied incredulously. "Do you realize -- "

"Yes, but you're to listen to _me_, aren't you?" Alice said pointedly. "Ira, you do it."

"Ma -- " her grownup Jonah tried.

"Don't try to follow us, buddy," Juliet said over her shoulder as George and Alice pulled her away; her worry for them was worse because she knew Faraday's pocketknife was in Jonah's pocket now. "Please. Just don't."

She went with them willingly until nearly two hours had passed. George and Ira walked on ahead; Alice walked behind her with a gun drawn.

"Why'd you do it?" she finally asked Alice in a low voice.

"Do what?"

"Work for Jacob's brother."

"Don't act like you've never thought about it, love. You have to admit it makes a hell of a lot more sense than working for Jacob."

"Who was I killing all those people for?"

"For me, mostly," Alice said flippantly. "For Jacob's side when we had to keep up appearances, of course. No more questions."

"Why not?"

"That's another question, love."

"Don't call me that." Her knuckles ached from where she'd hit Alice earlier. And Alice had one hell of a black eye now. _Good._

"I really don't think you're in a position to be making demands, do you?"

"I just think I have a right to know how long everything's been a lie."

"About as long as you've been in total denial. For someone with such a great poker face, you sure gave away enough to Ben before you got back _here_. Now shut the bloody hell up, please."

Except Juliet had shut the bloody hell up for long enough. George and Ira were still walking slightly ahead of them. She had about one and a half seconds to get this right. Thank the universe Alice was so small. Juliet spun around and slammed her fist into Alice's face and grabbed the gun as Alice stumbled. Juliet whirled around, squeezing a shot into Ira before he'd turned around. Had George bleeding out on the ground before he'd reached for his own gun.

She spun again, but Alice must have had another gun, because it was now pointed at Juliet's head. "Drop it," Alice ordered from her crouched position. Juliet hesitated. Alice cocked the safety. "I'm serious."

Juliet slowly unfurled her fingers. The gun fell to the ground. Alice stood. "Lie down on your stomach."

Juliet felt a cold splinter of fear. "Alice -- "

"I mean it. Lie down! Now!"

"Please don't do this. My son needs me."

"How much longer are you going to hide behind that?" Alice fired a shot into the ground near Juliet's feet. (She regretted flinching.) "I WILL make it hurt. Lie. Down."

Slowly, Juliet sank to her knees, moved forward until she was doing as Alice asked, lying on her stomach on the jungle floor, a root digging into her ribs. Was this it? Dead with a bullet to the back of her head, deep in the jungle? At least it could be quick, unlike last time, waiting to bleed out at the bottom of a deep fucking hole -- and Alice's knee was in the center of her back, between her shoulder blades. Slowly she leaned forward, until Juliet could feel her warm breath on the shell of her ear.

"Which shoulder was it, love?" Alice asked coolly.

"Wh... What?" If Alice was going to kill her, maybe it would be nice if she just got it over with. Except -- wait. Juliet still couldn't be killed... right? But would she have known if that safety ran out? Would Alice? -- and Alice was bending back Juliet's right arm, gently.

"This one?" Alice whispered into Juliet's ear, and Juliet suddenly knew what she meant.

Before she could get out a breath, Alice jammed her knee _hard_ into Juliet's back and twisted her left arm with all her strength. The pop, the searing pain, her drawn-out scream and her watering eyes.

"Or _that_ one?" Alice said. Juliet panted into the soil, trying not to pass out from the pain. She could hear Alice standing up, dusting herself off. "By the way, love, we always had a surgeon. Sorry for all those times you failed."

Alice's footsteps retreated.

Juliet's scream echoed inside her head.

------ END FLASHBACK ------

Two weeks later, she has three ignored calls from Daniel stacked up on her phone (she'd checked the number against her phone book and sure enough, it was his). She's got more mundane things to worry about, like the sociology paper that's due Monday. Eight pages, double-spaced. Her printouts are scattered across the kitchen table and so far all she's typed into the laptop is her fake name.

"Knock, knock."

She looks up from the table. "There's no door to the kitchen, James."

"Now ya tell me. So you're really gonna be at this all day, Blondie?"

"Not sure yet."

"It's Saturday."

"And this is due Monday." She sits quite still, watching him. She's left this paper unwritten long enough, and it may be a community college course she doesn't necessarily need, but she's only letting herself act like a total jerk in one class, and this isn't it.

"Well, me and the boy're gonna have ourselves a little guys' day out."

"That sounds good."

"Yeah, he's been buggin' us to go back to OMSI, so I figured we'd go today. Seein' as how you don't like it, should work out good."

The Oregon Museum of Science & Industry. Perfect. "It's not that I don't like it. It's just that..."

"What?"

"I just don't know why we have to be pushing him into science like this."

"Jules, we ain't_ pushin' _him into anything. He wants to go. He likes science, and he loves that museum."

She just looks at him, watching him grow defensive.

"'Sides, it ain't like I'm takin' him to a strip club."

"Ha, ha."

"'Ha, ha'? That's all I get, 'ha, ha'?" He throws his hands into the air. "Look, whaddya want? The kid likes science, he wants to go to the science museum, I'm gonna take him. What, you want him to follow in your esteemed footsteps and become a mechanic?"

She closes her eyes, biting the inside of her cheek. Normally his jokes are just that, jokes, part of the banter that filled a good portion of their conversations. It had underscored all that sexual tension in their early days in Dharmaville, and they'd just always kept it up. But his little mechanic dig isn't funny to her. Not at all. It burns. She snaps her eyes open and can't help the glare.

He looks a little tongue-tied. "Ah, shit, I'm s--"

"Go ahead. Have a good time." Her voice is icy. She turns back to her notes, not looking at him.

* * *

Eight pages, double-spaced. Well, she has six of them done, and they're pretty good, all things considered. She figures that's good enough for now, maybe she'll start dinner soon, try to make up for earlier.

The front door bangs open; the ridiculous 30-second warning whine starts up and she can hear the beeps as James punches in the alarm code with his thumbs the way he always does. She's barely approached the kitchen archway when James is suddenly right up in her face, startling her. Jonah's just behind him, oblivious to the unfathomable anger on James' face. Jonah's simply bubbling over with excitement about the museum -- "Mama, guess what _we_ saw?" -- but James cuts him off. "Do me a favor an' go up to your room, Obi-Wan."

"But I wanna tell Mama about the lasers and -- "

"Later," James orders. Jonah glares in protest and then spins around and stomps up the stairs; James is practically shoving his phone into her face. "Faraday called me," he bites out.

"What?"

"Faraday called me," he says, more forcefully this time. "I know about Jonah. On the island." He shakes and shakes with anger. Juliet can't remember how to breathe.


	76. Trust

**This chapter is dedicated to se34201 for suggesting the flashback!**

* * *

_"But the more I drove, the more I felt like I had somewhere to go. I was making difficult left turns that no one would ever do unless they had to."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

Juliet's just staring at him like she didn't quite hear or understand him, which he knows is a damn fucking lie just like God knows how much else is a fucking lie. She's just standing there staring at him with that eerily calm look on her face, but he knows her well enough to notice the tension set in her mouth, the way she's not actually blinking. "I'm sorry," she finally whispers.

"You're sorry? You're SORRY? 'Sorry' ain't gonna cut it! How the fuck could you keep somethin' like this from me?!" She narrows her eyes at him, clearly measuring out her words but he doesn't let her even fucking start. "It's true, ain't it? You knew him? You SAW him? Talked to him? He didn't make it off? That's what you been freakin' out so bad about? What the fuck, Juliet? I know I wasn't there but he's my goddamn kid too! You had no right to go keepin' somethin' like this from me! Were you outta your fuckin' mind?!"

Juliet turns her head away from him sharply. "Yes, I probably was."

"An' what's that supposed to mean, ice queen?" He takes another step closer to her, this isn't right, the way his instinct is suddenly to physically invade her space, but she stands her ground, meeting his eyes again.

"It means you have no idea, James," she says coldly, evenly. "You have no idea what it was like back there. And that day we left."

"Yeah, well, maybe I got no idea because you never tell me anythin'! You tell me what you feel like, when you feel like it! I never know what's the truth or the whole story because you never gimme enough to make sense of any of it! It ain't just you anymore! You don't just get to decide whatever YOU wanna do on your own! We're supposed to be TOGETHER, Juliet! That means we're supposed to tell each other the goddamn TRUTH! And he just -- he just grows up and becomes a fucking physicist and learns how to send people around in fucking TIME? And we don't fucking STOP HIM?!"

"I don't know," she says impassively. "Daniel thought it could be dangerous to try to change it. I don't know what I think. I want to change it."

"And what you said about not pushin' him into science -- " (she nods) " -- 'cause he just... Well, this is just fuckin' bullshit, Juliet! How the fuck am I ever supposed to trust you again?"

"Maybe you shouldn't," she says coolly.

"Yeah, an' what's that supposed to mean?"

She shrugs. "Whatever you think. I'm sorry." The way she starts twisting her wedding ring all of a sudden floods him with both a stomach-churning nervousness and an entirely self-fucking-righteous anger.

"An' you married me with all these _lies_ between us? What the fuck kind of marriage is this supposed to be?!" He's outright yelling at her, at a volume that would make any normal person shrink away or start yelling back, but she's just standing there, that same unmoved expression on her face. "Maybe you really are one of them through and through, aren't you? An Other. What the fuck do you even call yourselves, anyway?"

"It doesn't matter what we -- " she starts, and then the anger overtakes her face, and in a way he's almost relieved, but he knows how he's pushed her too far and they're both going to pay the price now. "You know what, James? SCREW YOU." She steps right up into his face, close enough for him to automatically step back, or maybe it's the sudden advent of what she just said or the volume, but she's jabbing a pointing finger at his face. "I NEVER asked to be one of them, that's _fucking crap_ and you know it so don't _even_ pull that on me! You have no fucking clue what I've been going through and maybe that's my fault because I haven't been telling you, but you should consider yourself _lucky_ to not have been carrying this burden, OK?"

"That's bullshit!" he yells. "We're fuckin' married, we're supposed to share our -- "

"_Why?!_" she demands, her volume reaching his now, and they're both yelling near the top of their lungs. "Why should you have to suffer like that?!"

"Suffer? Oh please, throw yourself a goddamn pity party why don't you, like I haven't been dealing with watching YOU bottling everything up and -- "

"What if we _never_ find out if he's OK? What if we're dead before he even goes to the island? Or what if we're still alive, and he never fucking comes BACK?!"

"So we'll _change_ it -- we can't really have raised him to -- "

"Maybe you didn't, maybe I did! And what if we _can't_? You REALLY want to look forward to that? I don't fucking CARE what you think, James! I did it for you. And I asked you. I asked you! I _asked_ you, if something truly terrible were to happen, would you want to know about it. And you said no. YOU. SAID. NO!"

"You DON'T just get to hide behind hypotheticals! You wanna know what I think? I think you're guilty. I think you're guilty for shit you did back then an' you don't like to think about it so you just try to pretend NONE of it ever happened!"

"Well _look_ who just caught on!" she snaps, her stunted words punctuated by that icy glare. "Wow, newsflash, I fucking hate myself, of course I fucking hate myself, some guy punched me and after I killed him, I laughed. How broken does someone have to be before THAT happens, James? And I'm sure YOU never did anything that you hated yourself for? No, James, you live a fucking perfect life now, your Masters degree, your three-bedroom in the 'burbs, movie nights, well, what's it feel like to be so perfect? And now you're stuck with this huge fucking _mess_? You're probably kicking yourself for even writing down my phone number!"

"This shit _didn't_ just happen to you! I'm HERE, I've been INFINITELY FUCKING PATIENT with you -- "

" -- And your overprotectiveness is -- "

"I don't fucking CARE, I'm trying to keep you SAFE and it's like you don't even -- "

"What? APPRECIATE it? And yeah, I'm insanely grateful, but you know WHAT? I can't be home without the alarm turned on, you have to go with me to the goddamn SALVAGE YARD, and, what? I'm not 'ALLOWED' to go running outside anymore? Sometimes I feel like I'm in fucking jail!"

"Is _that_ what this life is? You feel like you're in fucking _jail_? At least in jail you would have spilled your guts to your goddamn lawyer! What the FUCK am I supposed to be in your life, decoration?"

"Maybe if every time I told you something you wouldn't freak the hell out, I would tell you more!"

"Do NOT even FUCKING blame THIS SHIT ON ME, goddammit! This was all you, you can NOT shift the blame, that's NOT how this is fucking gonna go! This is the most fucked-up thing you possibly could have done, that shoulda been what you told me the FIRST FUCKING NIGHT you were here -- "

"WHY? So you can be as miserable and fucked-up and broken as me? Oh. Yeah. I'm sorry! I'm sorry I tried to protect you!"

"If you're so miserable then what are you even doing here?"

She softens slightly. "James. That's not what I meant."

"I don't think I can look at you right now," he finally says. "I need to get outta here."

Her eyes flicker to the door. "It's your house, James. I'll leave."

"Don't give me that shit. It's OUR house, Juliet." He spins around and zips his jacket. He'd never even taken it off. Juliet never moves. He slams the front door as hard as he can.

------ FLASHBACK (1974) ------

If it weren't New Year's Eve tonight, she probably wouldn't have been thinking about time. That was ironic in itself, considering time was all they were probably supposed to be thinking about. Ten times the sub had come and gone. She hadn't seriously contemplated getting on it in... What, three months?

But here it was, New Year's Eve on the island in 1974, and how much longer were they supposed to go on pretending in this time? Sometimes it felt like all there were doing was reading from some script, the guys on the path to the Arrow in their khaki jumpsuits and her in her ridiculously hot navy blue one. And Monday through Friday she fixed electric-blue Jeeps and rolled herself under white-roofed vans, her calloused hands gripping tools (the types of tools her father had taught her to use in the driveway of his little divorced-dad house on a dead-end street), and at night she played poker with whomever was around, or else she and James read on their scratchy plaid couch, or sat out on their front steps drinking beer and talking.

(James hadn't mentioned Kate in two months. Not that Juliet had been counting.)

She stared at herself in the mirror, taking a last swipe at her straightened hair. She can't help but notice how scared she looks for some reason.

Two months ago she'd finally told him how she'd gotten her mark. A month ago she'd told him about her sister, and she was scared about what that meant. She'd never told anyone, not even Goodwin. Maybe because now she really couldn't imagine ever seeing Rachel again. Or maybe because she trusted James more than she could remember ever trusting anyone.

(But if he didn't make a move soon, maybe she really would get on that sub next time.)

* * *

Goddamn, when was he ever gonna grow a pair and make a move? Not that it was exactly a good idea to screw your roommate but... He knew it was more than that. Sex, he could get anywhere. It wasn't that. Or... At least it wasn't _just_ that.

He could hear her getting ready in the other room for this dumbass New Year's Eve party, and they'd both been on edge the last couple of days. Part of him thought it was just the stress of time passing (time was fucking with them, is what it was doing) but then part of him thought it was the way they looked at each other for too long and he would get scared that those calm blue eyes could tell what sort of X-rated things he could be thinking at times, but... She was the first person he could trust. Who was never fazed by all the bad shit he'd done. ("You did what you had to," she'd told him, unblinking, about shooting Mr. Friendly.)

It was just... he couldn't imagine sitting on that couch reading with anyone else. Or not hearing that terrible off-key singing he heard sometimes wafting from the shower. ("You're a livin' cliche, sweetheart.") And she was stuck on this godforsaken rock because he'd asked her to stay. Sometimes he didn't know how he'd gotten so lucky, or if he even deserved it.  
He took one last glance at himself in the mirror. He'd actually bothered to shave and figured out how to iron a damn shirt and he wished he could remember any of his old unfailing lady-charmin' moves, but something about Juliet always seemed to induce amnesia when it came to all that.

And why in the hell was he so nervous tonight? Who cared about a stupid New Year's party in the Dharma rec room with that moldy carpet and crappy Dharma-brand booze? So time was passing them by, but it would have been passing them by in the real world, too.

* * *

Their merry band of time travelers lost one member shortly after arrival at the party. Of course it was Miles, who automatically hoofed it to the chick showing the skankiest amount of cleavage. In some other time, that might have been James. Leave it to Miles to help James see sometimes how far he'd come.

Some song by Geronimo Jackson was playing. "Dharma Lady," James thought, but the place was already loud enough that it was hard to tell.

Jin hung back behind Juliet and James -- they'd practically had to coerce him to come with them but the poor guy had been struggling more than usual lately, thinking that his baby would probably be due in another month. And they could try to cheer him up all they wanted, but there was nothing anyone could really do. Juliet protectively squeezed Jin's hand and asked if he wanted a drink, and she disappeared for awhile in the sea of bodies (James noticed her talking to Horace briefly, and Horace's hair was really looking, uh, _festive_ tonight) before popping up again, clutching the necks of three beer bottles between the long fingers of her right hand.

James can hear faint strains of "The Joker" coming from the record player now, and Juliet meets his gaze with a smirk and a slight eyeroll.

"Wanna bet I can tell you what'll be the greatest hit songs of 1975?" he muttered in her ear as she hands him a bottle. Was it just his imagination, or did the skin on her neck and shoulder spring up in goosebumps when his lips brushed against her ear?

She looked back toward Jin, handed him a beer. "No, but I'll bet you both twenty bucks ABBA releases a self-titled album."

James was momentarily distracted by the way she swept her hair over her shoulder, and then there was the way her skin looked in that strapless top, and was she trying to drive him crazy tonight? "Huh?"

Jin glanced down at his beer bottle. "I do not feel like party. I am sorry," he said. "I think, I go home."

"Do you want us to go with you?" Juliet asked, worried.

"No. Thank you. Please, have a good time." Jin patted her shoulder politely.

They both watched him go. Another Geronimo Jackson song came on. "Shit," James finally said.

"I can't even imagine," Juliet answered.

"What?"

"How hard it must be to be separated from someone you love that way. I mean... I'll never stop missing my sister. But... It's his wife."

"Yeah," James sighed. The mood had turned decidedly dreary.

"Some New Year's, huh?" She offered him a wry smile, clinked her bottle against his. He tipped his chin up, his version of a nod.

"He'll come back."

She tilted her head. "Jin?"

"Locke."

Juliet frowned. "I don't know. I mean... I'm sorry. It must be hard for you, too."

"What're you talking about?"

"Nights like this... Parties... Jin. I just -- I know you must be wondering if Kate's OK." Those eyes were looking directly into his.

Kate? He'd long since given that up. Not that he didn't want her to be all right, because of course he did -- he'd always love her, but he'd given up here just like he probably would have given up if they'd both stayed on the island, or if they'd both managed to escape. Maybe he'd given up even before he'd jumped out of that helicopter (which could have been either the stupidest goddamn thing he'd ever done, or the best, not that he'd quite decided yet...) (Although every day it seemed like the balance was tipping toward the latter.) "You think that's what this is about? Hate to tell you this, blondie, but whatever happened, happened. I was thinkin' more like..."

He still had no idea how to read that blank face. Every time he thought he was getting better at it, she comes up with a slightly new variation. "What?" she asked.

"If Locke comes back, maybe you'll see your sister again."

Maybe it was just his imagination, but her eyes widened with something between sadness and... what? (Something in the back of his head would have almost said 'love,' but women like Juliet just don't fall for guys like him, not in any place. Even at the side of a freaky magic danger jungle. They called it Craphole Island, not Opposite-of-All-Other-Reality Island.)

But Juliet was touching his arm, and her fingers were cold from the beer bottles and warm at the same time and her eyes were so very, very blue. "Thank you, James."

He could only nod, but why did he suddenly find his hand over hers on his arm? "Why don't we get something a little stronger to drink?" he suddenly said.

Her lips curled in a knowing smile and for a second he thought she'd call him out on what he was trying to do, his sad little attempt gather up some liquid courage for what, he didn't even know. "OK," she said.

Later he couldn't quite recall whose idea it was do shots, but after a few of them he could feel the warmth spreading throughout his extremities, and later he also remembered thinking the way Juliet was clinging to his arm had nothing really to do with being tipsy and more to do with the fact that being tipsy would be a decent excuse to hang onto his arm.

Juliet's fingers tightened on his elbow and she whispered something in his ear. Except whispering didn't quite work considering it was a loud party getting louder by practically the minute.

"What?" he said.

She shook her head and pulled him toward a corner of the room. He stood there next to her, not quite sure why she'd brought him over there -- there was nothing else in this corner of the room and why was she looking at him like that oh fucking hell he wasn't going to play this game anymore and he leaned forward and kissed her.

Later it would become clear to him that she'd dragged him into this semi-secluded corner for precisely that purpose, but in the meantime she raked her fingers through his hair and opened her mouth for him and he didn't think he'd ever possibly get done kissing her, it was like his fingers were meant to cup her face and she tasted like Dharma rum and absolution for everything he'd ever done wrong in his miserable life.

At one point James heard footsteps shuffle past and Miles muttered, "Fuckin' finally," at which point they both managed to flip Miles off without pulling away from each other.

"You wanna get outta here?" James groaned against her mouth.

"It's not midnight yet," she breathed as he planted kisses along her neck.

"You really care?"

"Not at all."

They practically ran back to the house. Later when they were naked and coiled around each other, still out of breath and decidedly sweaty, they heard cheering erupting from half a mile away. Midnight. 1975.

"Happy New Year, James," she whispered, and he tightened his arms around her and whispered the same, thinking that if it there were no Rachel and no Clementine to think about, maybe staying on this godforsaken rock for the rest of eternity might not be so bad after all.

------ END FLASHBACK ------


	77. On Her Feet

**Note: The site "ate" all my scene breaks in ALL of my previous chapters (I was using dashes instead of hard-rules and they're just... gone), so I'm going to be republishing them over the next few days as I have time. I apologize if you get a million site update emails -- you might want to unsubscribe until Monday or Tuesday if the emails will bug you.**

**That said, there will probably be a new chapter tonight. :)**

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_"The sun was collapsing with a glare that seemed prehistoric; I felt not only blinded but lost, or as if I had lost something."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

------ FLASHBACK (1925) ------

Five minutes later, Juliet was still lying facedown on the ground. She kept telling herself _just another minute _and she'd get up.

Just another minute and she'd get up. (If it weren't for Jonah, she would have given up years ago.) Her shoulder burned and throbbed, sending shooting pains down to her fingertips. (Why hadn't Alice even tried to pull the trigger? Would Juliet be able to sense it, if and when Jacob finally gave up on her?) (What if he already had?)

Finally, using her good arm, she pushed herself into a sitting position. She bit down on her lip to keep from making a sound. Glancing around the jungle and cradling her bad arm, she realized this time she was probably going to have to pop her arm back in by herself. (She should have expected it would come to this.)

On shaky legs she approached a sturdy-looking tree. She had lifted her right wrist, trying to wedge it between branches when she heard voices and turned around slowly, still cradling her wrecked arm. She recognized Sid and Fran, with three others (Others, ha) she didn't know. "Jesus, you scared the shit out of us," Fran breathed. "You OK? Joe sent us."  
Juliet locked her face into blankness, not sure if this was a trick. (How was she supposed to know whom she could still trust?)

As if sensing Juliet's hesitation, Sid held out his hands in front of him. "We promise, Jules, we're your side. Which way did they... Oh," he finished lamely, noticing the bodies of the two men who'd been with Alice. (Why hadn't Alice even tried to pull the trigger?)

"I -- " Juliet cleared her throat. She didn't think she'd cried in almost two years, and she wasn't about to start again now. "Alice got away. She went toward Jacob's brother's camp. You know the way? Near the coves on the northeast shore. Maybe about five minutes ago."

The three men whose names she didn't know ran off in that direction. Fran tried -- twice, unsuccessfully -- to pop Juliet's shoulder back in. (Juliet couldn't hold in the scream either time.) Juliet tried again herself, couldn't get it. (Couldn't hold in the scream.) Sid apologized but refused to try. "Dottie has medical training," Juliet finally said, frustrated and struggling to stay on her feet. The fucking pain just wouldn't stop. And those three attempts hadn't helped matters.

(Goddamn Alice, if she ever saw her again she'd kill her.)

"It's a two-hour walk," Fran said doubtfully. Sid pulled off his shirt, tried to make a sling for her._ There's only so much longer I'm going to be on the island_, Juliet tried to tell herself, and that was the only thing that got her feet moving again.

------ END FLASHBACK (1925) ------

Once the sound of the Jeep has faded off down the hill, Juliet realizes she doesn't know what she's supposed to do but she knows she has to do something. She yanks open the dishwasher to clear it out, but the second those first two glasses are in her hands, her fingers twitch and she spins around, hurls them at the cabinets across the room. The shatter is louder than she expected, satisfying as hell, and Cat jumps and hisses -- Juliet hadn't realized she'd been under the kitchen table -- and bolts from the room.

So Juliet grabs two more glasses, spins around again and throws those too. She breaks every glass in that fucking dishwasher, and it's not until she realizes a sliver has bounced back and cut her cheek that she thinks maybe she doesn't need to break the dishes, too.

She just sits down in the middle of the kitchen near the half-circle of broken glass, presses her hands to her face and lets herself cry. What a mess she's made of everything.

After she doesn't even know how long, she gets the sense she's being watched and _oh my god it's Jonah_. His face is wide-open and confused, and she doesn't even know what she's supposed to do or say; how many times in his life has he already witnessed something scary or fucked-up? However he manages to grow up into such a normal, funny, relatively well-adjusted person (except all that time-traveling business) still seems beyond her comprehension sometimes.

"Hey, Jonah," she says softly.

He purses his lips, balls his hands into fists. "Why'd... Why'd you break all the glasses?"

Another little piece of her heart crumbles off and rolls away. "How long have you been there?"

"I heard you breaking them," he says accusingly. You and Dad used bad words. Like, the _really_ bad ones."

Shakily she gets to her feet. "Let's go in the living room, all right?" She crunches over the broken bits glass in her sneakers, pauses at the threshold to pull them off so she won't track glass all over the house. "You want to sit down?"

"Your face is cut," he says, but climbs onto the couch, sitting on his heels.

Juliet wipes her wrist against her cheek. "It'll stop in a second."

"What did you get so mad about?" Jonah presses.

She sits down on the edge of the couch, angled toward him. Waits until he's looking at her, his lower lip sticking out sulkily. He looks like his father when he does that. "You know how... You know how we aren't supposed to talk about the island to anyone else? Except each other and Dad?"

"Yeah?"

"Well, I didn't tell Dad about something important, and it hurt his feelings. A lot."

"What?"

"You know how sometimes bad things happened on the island?"

"Yeah."

"Remember the last day, how Joe couldn't come back with us?"

Jonah crinkles up his forehead, thinking. "Yeah. 'Cause of what the black smoke did."

"Right. I didn't tell Dad about that because I thought it would make him sad. But he found out anyway. And he was mad I didn't tell him."

"Oh. Where'd he go?"

"Target."

"You should call him to get new cups."

"We can get them another time."

"Is he still mad?"

"Sometimes when people have a big fight, they stay mad for awhile. But it doesn't mean that we don't both love you. You know that, right?" _Lame, lame, lame,_ she thinks. Even her own mother had done better.

"I know. Can we have pizza tonight?"

"That's it?"

"And you should read me two chapters."

"Oh, should I, huh?" She holds out her arms and he reluctantly moves into them. She just hangs onto her son while she still can. "I'm sorry you had to hear all that, Jonah," she whispers to him.

------ FLASHFORWARD (1925) ------

He did what his mother had asked, didn't follow her, although it was damn near impossible when all he wanted was to go tearing after her. But he needed to watch his little self (_weird, weird, weird, _he thinks) so he sent some people from his camp instead. People he knew he could trust. And he tries to explain to his little self what happened with Alice, but he finds he has to blame most of the altercation on his own mother, not Alice, to preserve the stupid fucking timeline. (And his little self was quite upset his mama hit Alice. "Hitting's not nice," the kid pointed out.)

_You know what else wasn't nice?_ That Joe hadn't known about Alice until just now. And maybe he IS just playing along with a script, but why didn't his mother want him to know about Alice? His mother from the future, that is... not the one who's currently God-knows-where out in the jungle right now -- and there were all those ripped-out pages, all that black marker covering over words and sentences? Unless she was just preserving the timeline too? Fucking bullshit built-in secrets.

About once a year while he was growing up, his mother would disappear off to Oxford. When Eva was little, she'd brought her along; several years later, his father started going on the trips too, leaving Clementine in charge. (Damn, those were some fun long weekends.) Eventually Faraday had joined the faculty at MIT.

And once they were done with their two years in Alabama (the two years that were only supposed to be one, but that was another story), they'd moved to Boston and then there was probably no counting how often his mother had been probably been pacing Faraday's office floor. Sometimes while Joe was working on his PhD he'd see her in the MacLaurin building and they'd exchange an awkward secret smile.

(Funny how nothing he learned from Faraday or his mother or anyone else could quite prepare him for the fact that he has to put his five-year-old self to bed tonight.)

Dottie agrees to stay in the cabin and Joe paces by the campfire. By the time Sid and Fran bring his mother back, the sun's nearly down, but he can see how pale she looks, the sweat slicked along her hairline. She had Sid's shirt knotted and draped as a makeshift sling.

"What happened?" he asks her anxiously.

"Dislocated shoulder," she replies weakly, rolling her eyes, trying to make light of it. "Again."

He brings her in to Dottie, helps her to sit on the table. Dottie briefly examines his mother's arm, then rummages through their cabinet of medical supplies. Dottie turns toward them, a bottle of ether and a rag in her hand.

"That bad, huh?" his mother tries to joke, but she lies down and Dottie knocks her out and Joe braces against his mother so Dottie can pop her arm back in. It takes several tries, and Dottie is visibly upset be the time they hear the crack as she gets it back into place.

"It's really true, about Alice?" she says softly.

"Yeah." There's a hollow ache in his chest.

Dottie's face contorts in sadness. "You think you could get her into bed? You can put her in mine."

"Yeah. Thanks." He reaches for his mother, who suddenly groans and puts her right hand to her face; he half-carries her to Dottie's bedroom.

Dottie follows them, gives his mother two white pills, which she dry-swallows. "Sorry we don't have anything stronger."

"That's OK," his mother mumbles, her eyes still closed. Joe suddenly remembers the shoulder surgery his mother had finally had when he was around ten. _Damn_. His father had been nagging her forever to do it before she finally did.

Now Dottie nods at Joe. "You think you could stay with her a little while? Richard's having a meeting a few minutes. She's gonna be kinda loopy for awhile."

He nods, surprised she would even ask. Dottie knows who he really is, after all. The woman had delivered him, for Christ's sake. Technically that meant Dottie was the first woman who'd ever seen him naked.

"It's OK if she goes to sleep," Dottie's telling him. "Just come get me if she starts acting strange or saying something incoherent. She might cry or have to throw up -- just warning you. Ether's not always a picnic."

Great. And it sounded like so much fun in The Cider House Rules. So Dottie leaves and Joe finds a chair in the corner of the room, drags it over to the bed.

"What, are you just gonna sit there and watch me lie here pathetically?" his mother mumbles into the pillow.

"Hush up and go to sleep."

"You sound like your father when you say that," she says, her voice far away, still stoned from the ether.

Joe has no idea what he's supposed to say, so he keeps quiet.

His mother doesn't say anything for a long time; he thinks maybe she's fallen asleep. "Please tell me I leave this hellhole soon," she mutters, her eyes shut tight.

"You do," he assures her. _But then what do I know that you haven't told me?_

"What do I end up doing, off the island?" They've been together a week and a half, and his mother's played by the rules, a lot more than he has. She's asked him almost nothing about the future.

And he realizes his mother's not the only one hanging onto secrets. "You really think I'm going to tell you about your future?"

"You said I took notes and went to see Daniel." She stirs slightly, drags her good arm across her eyes. He takes the hint and turns down the lantern.

"Well, yeah, but only because I was supposed to."

"How do you know what you're allowed to tell me and what you're not?"

"Complicated mathematical equations," he says, trying to sound sarcastic. Trying not to think about her in the hallways of the physics building at MIT.

"So are you married?"

"What did I just tell you?"

"You said you're not going to tell me about _my_ future. Throw me a bone here. My arm's on fire and I feel like I'm about to throw up."

"You want a garbage can?"

"What clubs were you in in high school?"

"Not science club."

"Good move."

He hesitates. "I'm divorced."

"Really?"

"Yeah."

"I'm sorry, buddy." (Always with the buddies. He'd forgotten how much she used to call him that. It still fell from her lips in his present, now and then, but not like back then.... Back now. When had it dwindled? He can't remember.)

"It's OK. Her name was Megan. It was awhile now. When I was 25."

"Why?"

"One of us was an asshole. I'm just never sure which one of us it was." She laughs softly, so he goes on, encouraged that he's distracting her from the pain. "Anyway, you never liked her. You never said anything, but I could tell." _Fuck._ Why did he just say that? Now she does know at least something about her future, that she'll still be alive at least twenty years from now. Although he can't really see why that would be such a bad thing to know.

"Did you ever think I never liked her because I knew you would get divorced?"

"...Shit."

She groans, tries to roll over and then thinks better of it. "We're not going to talk about the future anymore."

"Agreed."

And she doesn't even know that about a month from now, she'll drive up a hill with his five-year-old self in the backseat and see his father and Clementine standing outside a light gray house.

"Dating anyone?" she finally teases. She sounds like she's starting to feel better.

He laughs. And doesn't know why he starts talking about Carolyn after that.

------ END FLASHFORWARD ------

Juliet and Jonah eat pizza in the living room. He asks a lot of questions. She answers them quietly, listening for the sound of the Jeep in the driveway.

She lets him play Nintendo while she cleans up the glass in the kitchen. Gives him a bath, tucks him in, starts reading to him. "Mama?" he interrupts after a couple of pages.

Juliet smooths her hand over his forehead. "What is it?"

"I like it here better than on the island."

_That's exactly what I'm afraid of,_ she thinks.

------ FLASHBACK (1925) ------

In the morning she wakes to sunlight in her eyes and her six-foot-one son slumped in the chair against the bed. She checks the other room; Dottie is asleep next to the little one.

Against her better judgment she takes off the sling, hikes out to the arsenal, helps herself to a rifle. Walks to the ocean. Across the sand. Into the water. She ducks under.

_Do I still have your protection._

_No. You haven't had it for awhile._

_I thought maybe I would be able to tell._

_But you couldn't._

_No._

_But Alice didn't try to shoot me._

_Well, that's her business._

_When._

_When what._

_When did you give up on me._

_It was a lot of little things all added up. Richard is getting you off the island because he doesn't want you to die here. I don't really care anymore. And you don't know how much that hurts me. That I don't care. But Richard has a body, and I don't. So you'll leave. Maybe you'll still remember. Someday._

_But they tricked me._

_And you fell for it. You became one of them. You always become one of them, whoever they are. The circumstances change. The results always stay the same. I thought it would be different with you and me._

_What are you even talking about._

_It doesn't matter. Go away._

It had always been Juliet who'd ended their conversations before. She broke the surface of the water, surprised at how Jacob's dismissal had stung. The air in her lungs burned as she inhaled. She couldn't get back to the rifle on the sand fast enough.

------ END FLASHBACK ------

The house is dark when James gets back, and his heart seizes with a pointless panic. It's only a little after 9, and her car is in the driveway, and?

(And what are they supposed to do now, anyway?)

He finds her up in Jonah's room, asleep sitting up against his headboard. The way it must have been between the two of them before they'd left the island.

The Trumpet of the Swan is lying open-faced on the floor. James shifts where he stands, not wanting to leave and not wanting to wake her, but a floorboard creeks.

Juliet opens her eyes, looks at him without hiding behind her mask. And he sees a flood of emotions cross her face. She's just looking at him with everything in her at this moment, the exhaustion, regret, sadness written all over her face.

"He OK?" James asks.

"More or less," she says softly.

"You want to go downstairs?"

She nods.

They sit on the couch in the living room. It feels oddly formal for the two of them. He waits for her to start talking. "I'm sorry," she finally says. "I... know I should have told you. I should have told you all along. And today I said a lot of things I shouldn't have. I got defensive, and I was trying to hurt you."

"What happens to him?"

"I don't know."

"Do you really hate yourself?"

Juliet looks at him for a long time. She doesn't even really know, does she? "Sometimes," she finally says. "Logically, I know they did all those things to me on purpose. To ruin me, to get Jacob to give up on me. But... I felt so powerless back there. Maybe I thought... If I could control the situation here, at least that would be one thing I could handle. To keep that burden off you."

"You can't handle this by yourself, Juliet."

"I know." Tears spring to her eyes. "It's just -- after everything you've been through... I didn't want you to ever experience losing anyone again."

She sees the anguish pass over his face. "What... What happened when I was a kid was bad enough. An' we don't ever talk about that, I know. But goddammit, Juliet, when you let go of my hand..."

"I know," she whispers. Her hand reaches out for his, now; she doesn't know whether she expects him to yank his hand away in protest, but when her fingers curl around his, he holds on.

"I'm thinkin' we might have communication problems," he says.

Juliet doesn't know why she finds that so funny, but all of a sudden a smile stretches across her face, and she actually giggles. Of all the ridiculous reactions in the world. "You think?"

He allows himself a grin too, draws circles with his thumb over the back of her hand. "I hate that you were actually dead."

"I hate that you worry about us so much," she says.

"I hate that you feel like you can't talk to me."

"I feel guilty that I thought of myself as one of them."

"I feel guilty I couldn't get back to ya."

"I feel guilty _you_ feel guilty about that."

"I'm glad Hugo gave me your phone number."

"I'm glad you got me pregnant probably in the back of a Dharma van."

"I don't want you to hate yourself."

She laughs softly. "I hate that I feel like such a science experiment gone wrong."

"You do realize that two of my closest friends in the world can talk to the dead, right?"

She pauses. "Now what are the odds of that?"

"Dunno, but you're way hotter than Miles or Hurley."

"James... When I accused you of overreacting... That's not true. I think I had this mental image of the way you used to be, when I first met you. You... You're not that person anymore. And it's just been so long, I guess I forgot that. Or you changed more than I remembered. You never overreacted to anything I told you. I'm just... I guess I don't know how to judge normal reactions anymore. And I just underreact to everything."

"Least 'till you break all the glasses in the kitchen."

She winces. "I thought I cleaned it all up."

"Saw 'em in the garbage."

"Oh."

He reaches out to touch her cheek, the skin near her cut. "I did the same thing once."

"You did?"

"Yeah. One of those bad Julys."

"Oh."

"Juliet, I..."

She looks up, afraid. _Is this it? Is it over?_

"I don't wanna pretend. I want us to have a real fuckin' chance. No more pretendin' to be happy. Either we are or we ain't, but no more pretendin'."

"You... You're not still angry?"

"Hell yes I'm still angry. You should have told me about him a long time ago. Maybe if you had, you wouldn't have been beatin' up on yourself for so goddamn long. It wasn't makin' it any easier on me, whether you'd like to believe it or not."

"I don't want to pretend anymore either." She slides forward and sinks into his arms, which tighten around her. She wraps her own around him for a long, long time.

"...What's he like?" he finally says when they pull apart.

"When he's grown?"

James nods.

Her smile verges on sad, she can feel it. "He's amazing, James. He's funny and smart and... he just has such a big heart. I don't know what we did right, but we must have done something."

"It was him, wasn't it? Who broke into the house and wrote the numbers on the basement door?"

"Yeah," she says softly. Her heart pangs in protest.

"You still don't got no ideas why?"

She shakes her head.

"So what happened? When you left?"

The tears in the corners of her eyes threaten to spill. "The smoke happened," she whispers.


	78. Easy

_"In the recurring dream, everything has already fallen down, and I'm underneath. I'm crawling, sometimes for days, under the rubble."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

------ FLASHBACK (1925) ------

Time was definitely, definitely fucking with them.

That is to say, time was fucking with everyone. Everything seemed to be getting increasingly unstable; of the three men who went after Alice, two came back empty-handed, their hair grown down to their shoulders. They'd been gone from 1925 for only a day, but had spent nearly six months living in the distant past, the year unknowable. The third had died while they were there, from an infected cut.

Jonah -- the adult one -- went back to his camp; Juliet knew he was working with Faraday and the science team nearly around the clock. Richard had their people surround the natives' camp with a massive circle of ash that was supposed to protect them; Juliet was under strict orders to not leave, although for once she had no desire to. Everyone else was commanded to shoot Alice on sight in any year, and Ben in 1925 only.

On the morning of what would have been Thanksgiving if they'd celebrated such things on the island, Juliet and Dottie were sterilizing medical equipment in the shallow pans they'd laid out on their table.

Juliet had never done Thanksgiving back here; it didn't make much sense. And Dottie had grown up on the island so she didn't celebrate American holidays. Sure, Juliet had always tried to do something for Christmas, for Jonah's sake, and for his birthdays, of course -- Nick had always been so good at helping her with that -- and since he'd died, she managed to get her act together twice a year and that was what she could manage. Except Christmas was in a month and she hadn't even thought about that yet. But maybe they really would be gone by Christmas this time.

Maybe they'd be in Miami.

Maybe they'd be _home_.

(But what about her grown son? Was he staying? Was he leaving? Would she have to wait decades to talk to this version of him again?) She was lost in her thoughts amid the sound of clinking instruments and the shallow smell of disinfectant. "Could you pass me the -- " Suddenly Dottie squinted and rolled off her chair, disappearing in time.

(Juliet hoped Faraday's team knew what they were doing.)

------ END FLASHBACK ------

------ FLASHFORWARD (1925) ------

They are definitely, definitely fucking with time.

Joe leaves his mother's camp to pick up his work with Faraday's team, although he knows they're almost done now. (Their team had taken care of the future -- now the past. His mother, in the future, will take care of the past. Couldn't be simpler.)

But in the meantime, everyone here keeps getting sucked into the wrong times and there isn't a hell of a lot they can do about it. Chrono-insanity, courtesy of your friendly neighborhood hydrogen bomb.

On the morning of what would be Thanksgiving if they'd celebrated such things on the island, he hikes back to his mother's camp. But his eye catches on the cabin where his childhood friend Chris had lived. Ever since his mother had tried to warn Christopher's mother about the battle in which she'd be -- _been_ -- killed, Joe's been searching his memory. Had that happened, really? Chris' father, Christopher Sr., had died; he'd already left for the battle before Joe's mother had gotten involved. Of that, Joe was certain. But Elspeth?

(He feels like his mind is telling him two different things.)

Joe stands in front of the door and knocks. While he listens to the footsteps approach the door, he allows himself a brief daydream, his mother standing at the door to his father's office back home, telling him a memory changed. His heart's in his throat and he's not even sure why. Except his mother had gone to the island in the first place to save mothers, hadn't she? Not for all this other time-travel/singularity-prevention/supernatural-chatting/hiking-in-the-rain/beating-people-up-in-the-jungle bullshit they seemed to be permanently mired in.

And the woman who swings the door open is Elspeth Bennett, no doubt, and she's looking at him, confused. She's never seen him before. At least, not since he was three. No, wait -- not since he was five. It's taken two years to save her, or a hundred and nineteen. (Good thing his first math teacher was such a stickler.) Elspeth smiles at him, blankly, politely. "Can I help you? ...Aren't you one of the scientists?"

"S-sorry," he stammers. "Sorry, I must have knocked on the wrong door. Have a nice day."

_Have a nice life._

------ END FLASHFORWARD ------

Somewhere around 2 a.m., James and Juliet are both half-hoarse from talking and crying, but it feels like some kind of curse has been broken, no matter what they have facing them down the line. One hell of a way to spend a Saturday night, though.

"I'm scared I'm never going to get pregnant and it's going to break my heart," she admits to him. They're still on the couch, curled against each other. He's not sure he'll ever be willing to get off the couch at this point; the way she leans against him now feels more intimate somehow than almost anything that's come before. She wants to trust him, he can tell. She _does_ trust him.

"I'm scared you're always gonna want your real identity back, an' you're always gonna wanna be a doctor and won't be able to," he tells her.

"And I could solve the first problem if we could resolve the second," she says, and they laugh a little at the absurdity of it all.

He wants to tell her it'll all work out, but what the hell does he know, anyway? "You think they know where you are now?"

"I don't know. It's interesting that Alice found me in Miami, not here."

"Yeah, that's sorta what I was wonderin'."

Juliet shrugs.

"How'd she die?"

"Alice?"

"Yeah."

"Cancer. She was 42." Juliet pauses for a moment. "I think Jacob gave it to her. I don't know if she had it when I was on the island with her. I assume she did. After I left, I was able to do some research and that's when I figured out what ended up happening to her. It's ironic, in a way."

"What is?"

"She was trying to save the island so it would heal her. But the island -- Jacob, anyway -- probably gave her that cancer in the first place. Of course, thanks to the beauty of time travel, a lifetime may be finite, but that doesn't mean it's ordered." Juliet yawned. "Stupid physics. What time is it?"

James cranes his neck to see the digital readout on the DVR. "2:10."

"Ugh."

"Aren't you s'posed to be takin' the kids out for pancakes with Sandy an' her kids tomorrow?"

She stretches and then leans back against him again. "Yeah, I think I'm going to have to cancel at this point. And don't call her Sandy, she hates that."

"Fun to get a rise outta her."

"Oh, you never like my friends."

"What're you talkin' about?"

She hesitates for just the briefest of moments. "Remember that female Hostile who used to raid the Dharma supply drops? And stole those guns that time? I think you called her Little Miss Muffet?"

He furrows his brow. He has a sinking feeling he knows where this is leading all of a sudden. "Yeah?"

"That was Alice."

"...Sonuvabitch."

"Yeah," she says softly. "The first time I found out she'd seen you... well, I just about lost it."

"Ah, shit."

"What did Daniel have to say?" Juliet finally asks.

"He, uh." James tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. "He wants to help us. Charlotte's pregnant."

Juliet tilts her head in disbelief. "...What?"

"Yeah, weird, huh? I mean, don't you think she's kinda ol -- " He stops when he sees the Blue Glare of Death. "Oh, right."

"I wonder if they had fertility treatment," she says thoughtfully.

"Want me to call 'em up and ask 'em?"

Juliet rolls her eyes. "What does Charlotte being pregnant have to do with Daniel helping us?"

"He started mumbling somethin' about becomin' a father, and wantin' to protect his kid, and that it ain't right that ours is in danger, an' then he said Fertile Myrtle started yellin' at him, so he had a change of heart."

Juliet presses a hand to her mouth. "Oh, god..." she murmurs.

"What?"

"It's gonna be a boy. They're going to name him Sam."

And he thought he'd heard almost everything at this point. "What?"

"Oh my god. I can't believe I didn't see it before. Oh, damn."

"What the hell are you talkin' about? You know the future now?"

"Well, some of it, yeah. Sam is a scientist. Not a physicist, though. A -- a hydrologist, I think. A member of the team from the future. With Daniel and Jonah. He kicked me out of the time travelers' camp when Jonah -- the adult one -- was scheduled to be coming to the island. He was incredibly awkward about it, too. I should have realized he was Daniel's son. Oh, god. I think he had Charlotte's eyes. They never told me. He must have -- he must grow up to know me in the future."

"Sonuvabitch," James mutters, and she laughs.

"_Seriously._"

"They get away?"

"Yeah. They did. The day that... that I got my scar."

He reaches out to touch the curved white line on her collarbone. "You ever gonna tell me how you got that?"

Juliet covers his hand with her own, pressing his fingers into her skin. Looks him straight in the eye. "I got it when Alice saved my life."

------ FLASHBACK (1925) ------

Ten minutes after Dottie vanished before Juliet's eyes, someone was knocking on the door. Juliet swung it open and smiled. "What are you doing here?"

"Happy Thanksgiving," her son said. "How's your arm?

"Awesome," she said sarcastically, but she hugged him tightly anyway. "Unfortunately, I don't have much in the way of Thanksgiving food. There's mangos, and mangos."

"My favorite. Hey buddy," he said to the little version, who was tugging at his mother's sleeve.

Jonah brightened. "Mama, can I please, please play with Joe now?"

"Hey buddy, aren't you in school right now? Finish your math problems first and let me talk to him for awhile." He pouted and clomped off to the table.

"Slavedriver," her adult son muttered.

"If I really had any sense, I never would have taught you any math at all." Juliet couldn't help herself.

"What, and miss all this fun?"

She crossed her arms. "Dottie's gone."

"What do you mean, she's gone?"

"Got pulled into another time. Right where you were standing. About ten minutes ago."

"Oh, that. She'll be back." He pulled the satchel from his shoulder and thunked it on the table. "I brought some vegetarian Thanksgiving food."

"Do you know that for a fact?" Juliet challenged him.

"Do I know for a fact that I brought some vegetarian Thanksgiving food? Yep, it's in my bag."

"Do you know that Dottie will be back?"

Something strange flickered over his face. "Yeah. If nothing changes, anyway."

Juliet sighed. "How much longer?"

"Until Dottie comes back?"

"Until we leave."

"Not much longer."

"How about you?"

"What about me?"

"When are you leaving?"

He tilted his head, considering his words carefully, she could tell. "I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be."

"I don't suppose I could convince you to leave with us, could I?"

"You know I don't belong in 2013."

"I didn't mean that, just... leave at the same time as us." She knew she had no right to be asking him this. But just the same, she couldn't help herself. He was still her son, no matter how old he got. And the island was not a safe place. Not really. Not in any time. And especially not now.

And it turned people into liars, into killers, into people who would betray their friends, who would chose not to save people. She doesn't want him to stay and become like Alice. Become like her.

"I can't make any promises," he hedged.

"I know. But I don't want to leave here knowing you're still here. I'll worry. A lot."

He hesitated. She could tell. "You know I was here almost a year before you even laid eyes on me."

"I'm a mother. Mothers worry. It's what we do."

"I know. I'm sorry."

"No you're not."

He laughed. "No I'm not."

Her voice was smaller, more worried than she wanted. "I'll miss you. When we leave."

Across the room, her five-year-old threw down his pencil with an exasperated sigh. "I'm done now, can I please please PLEASE go play with Joe?"

"I love it when my kids play together," Juliet muttered, and the son standing next to her went to hoist the little one over his head to play their cannonball game. Her grown-up Jonah's laughter rang throughout the cabin.

(She was trying to memorize his laugh.)

* * *

Dottie was back later that day, having spent all of five minutes in 1923. Joe left again for his camp just before dusk. In bed that night, Juliet couldn't relax, listening to the winds whip up around the cabin. Her little boy sighed in his sleep. She felt like everything was in a holding pattern, and she didn't want to stop here.

And she didn't exactly want to go on, either.

She was nearly asleep when a subtle creak in the floor had her snap her eyes open. Richard was standing in the corner, surrounded in shadows, holding a finger to his lips. Juliet sat up slowly.

"It's time to go," he said quietly.

"What?" she whispered. "No. I need to say goodbye to my s-- "

"If you want to live, it's time to go."

Hard to argue with that. The floor was cold against her bare feet, her stomach clenched with fear or sleep deprivation or anticipation or agony, who even knew anymore. "Don't light the lantern," Richard warned her, and turned his back while she dressed.

"Can I take anything?"

"Very little."

"I just want my photographs."

Richard nodded, then slid a thick manila envelope from his satchel. "This is for you. It has all your documentation. Passports, credit card, that sort of thing. There's a cell phone in there as well." He handed over the envelope; she held it at arm's length for a moment, disbelieving, her passport (literally) into a new life, everything she was supposed to want.

"A cell phone." She squeezed the envelope and could feel a thin, hard rectangle of plastic.

"Yes, well, it's good to be prepared."

Juliet slid her photos into the folder and found her own bag, tucked it inside.

"Take your canteens," he said. "We can fill them on the way."

She was remembering that night that Richard helped her escape from Jacob's brother's people as she woke Jonah, got him dressed, whispered soothing words to him. She'd gotten her hopes up too many times. This wasn't happening. It wasn't. It couldn't. It wasn't. No. But it was. Her heart jumped.

In the front room she took half a step toward Dottie's bedroom; Richard shook his head at her and she reached for Jonah's hand. She didn't look back when they left the cabin.

There was no moon tonight.

* * *

They walked without speaking. Jonah held onto her hand loosely, his head nodding in exhaustion. He never asked very many questions, and maybe she should have tried to explain more of everything to him, but if they really did leave the island, she'd probably have to come up with a whole new set of answers, anyway. She was halfway lulled herself by their quick, steady footprints when she saw a flash of silver out of the corner of her eyes.

In an instant Richard was flat on the ground and a solid hunk of metal connected with her own head.

The last thing she remembered was wondering why she thought leaving could really have been that easy.


	79. The Edge of the Knife

**This chapter's dedicated to evamarino because this is her favorite Miranda July quote.**

**Also, because I'm a huge nerd, I uploaded some YouTube videos to make a soundtrack of sorts for this fic. The songs aren't really in any specific order, but they're songs that I've listened to while writing or that have otherwise inspired me. You can see them at the web address tia-no-one(dot)livejournal(dot)com (just replace the (dots) with actual periods, of course.**

**Four more chapters (I think) to go after this one. I can't believe it.  
**

**And for now, a chapter that I think many of you have been waiting for...  
**

* * *

_"In some bizarre, alternative, science-fiction reality, the rent was due."_

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

------ FLASHBACK CONTINUED (1925) ------

When she awoke she was lying on a slab of stone inside an ancient-looking room. The temple? The space that was rumored to be under the statue? She had no idea. Her head throbbed where she'd been hit.

"I'm sorry, Juliet," Ben said coldly. Sounding, of course, like he wasn't sorry at all.

She sat up a bit too fast, put a hand to her head. Didn't say anything, although she wanted to scream at him, demand to know where her son was. She wanted to fucking kill him. Instead she remained silent, just stared at him coldly, waiting for him to continue. He wanted her to react, she could feel it.

"Aren't you going to ask me, sorry for _hwhat_?" He was sitting a couple of feet away, holding a revolver, his silver baton on the ground next to him. God, she hated the way he said his w's.

Juliet just stared at him.

"Cat got your tongue?"

She tapped her fingertips on the stone floor, trying to look impatient.

"Oh, I _did_ teach you well, didn't I?" Ben looked pleased with himself. "Well, you won't have to wait long," he chuckled, but his eyes betrayed his light tone. "_He_ should be here an-ny minute."

Juliet struggled to exhale slowly, evenly. They sat in silence for a few minutes. She could tell Ben was itching to trill over his apparent victory, but her little mind game was too good to resist, especially considering it was all she had right now.

From her space on the floor, she noticed an odd shadow from behind a pillar about ten feet away. Her reflex was automatic; she couldn't help the way her eyes widened slightly, and Ben instantly jumped to his feet, whipping the gun front and center. She saw, then, the knife in a sheath at his hip.

------ FLASHFORWARD ------

_Please, please, please,_ Joe begs the universe as he pulls back the safety on his gun. _Please let this work._

------ FLASHBACK ------

Ben automatically pulled the trigger at the figure in the corner, but the gun clicked hollowly. He hissed in frustration, throwing the gun down as someone else fired a shot -- at Ben? At her? Ben ducked, pulling out his knife and grabbing Juliet up by the hair in one smooth move. "Don't try that again," Ben snapped, and Juliet's son -- her grown son -- stepped from the shadows, holding a gun.

"Let her go, you bug-eyed bastard."

"Or hwhat?" Juliet could feel Ben's breath on the back of her neck.

"Joe." Her voice was strained from the way Ben was pulling her head back. "Do it."

------ FLASHFORWARD ------

The instinct to hesitate was too strong, his mouth dry as he tried to measure out the distance, the likelihood of hitting his mother by accident. He remembers her in the kitchen -- a year ago, twenty-eight years from now, a hundred and seventeen years from now -- asking him if he's been to the shooting range lately, wincing at his answer and everything he's known and everything he's thought and everything that could be or should be or would be is crashing down on him and he doesn't know if he pulled the trigger or pulls the trigger or if he'll miss or who he'll hit and everything added up and subtracted and how much it all could end up costing.

------ FLASHBACK ------

She just wanted this over and done with, she wanted her son out of this structure before Jacob's brother arrived, in whatever form that might be, and she kept her eyes trained on her son, mentally commanding him to just take his chances and pull the trigger. If he took her down too, well, maybe it would be worth it in the end. He'd probably be a better parent to himself than she could be, anyway.

Ben shifted behind her and Juliet squirmed uncomfortably, her shirt sliding down slightly.

"Now hwhat in the hell is that?" Ben said in her ear. He kept the knife against her neck and reached into her shirt, ignoring her disgusted shudder. He slipped out the long leather cord. "They actually gave _you_ a key? Oh, Richard had to have been out of his mind." He reached out with the knife to cut the cord from her neck.

"Just shoot him!" she yelled to her son, trying to yank out of Ben's grasp. Ben hissed in disapproval, bringing the knife back up to her throat, his grip tightening on her.

"Even if you don't hit her, this knife slips and she's dead anyway," he told her son coolly. "Do you really want that on your conscience?"

"Joe! Just do it!" She couldn't stand the anguish in her son's eyes.

"I don't want to hurt you -- " he choked out.

"You won't -- "

"Wait," said another voice.

Her heart dropped. Alice was standing in the shadows, not far from Jonah. "We don't know what will happen if she dies now."

"_He_ won't let that happen this time," Ben said.

"Then let's just wait for him."

"And what do you suggest we do about our little stowaway?" Ben nodded his head toward her son.

Alice faltered slightly. "Oh, him? He's harmless. Just let him go."

"I don't think it's a matter of letting him go, Alice. I think it's a matter of getting him out of here."

"Please just let him go," Juliet said. "Joe. Leave."

------ FLASHFORWARD ------

"I'm not going anywhere," Joe told his mother. He kept the gun aimed in their direction, but his eyes slid over to Alice. What the fuck was that traitor bitch doing here?

"You don't want to be here when Jacob's brother arrives," his mother pleaded.

"I'm not leaving!" His hand had drifted a few inches down while they were speaking, and he raised it again.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," Alice said in a low voice.

"I'll kill her right now if I have to!" Ben snapped. "In front of you, is that what you want?"

"NO -- "

------ FLASHBACK ------

It was hard to breathe, thanks to the way Ben was holding back Juliet's neck, the fingers of his left hand knotted tightly into her hair.

"Ben," Alice said. "Stop. We don't have to do this -- let's just wait for -- "

"Did you know she had a key?" he demanded.

"What? No!"

"You should have taken it from her, you should have _known_. Where does your loyalty lie, Alice? Maybe you spent too much time over with Jacob's people. With _her!_" Ben's right hand shook slightly, the knife shifting under Juliet's chin. "I've had enough of waiting, I've been waiting my entire life for something -- we take the key, we get rid of her and it's _done_. We don't need Jacob, we don't need his brother -- "

He sliced through the air toward the leather cord to cut the key from her neck.

The second shot was almost deafening.

Ben's hand jerked down in an automatic reflex, the edge of the knife slicing through the thin skin over Juliet's collarbone as he fell. She could have sworn she felt it reach the bone before her vision dissolved into black and white static as she swayed once, fell to her hands and knees. Ben was lying on the ground a foot away from her, gulping air, bleeding from his right shoulder.

The key lay on the floor, its leather cord cut and bloody.

(Everything was ugly and everything hurt.)

She hadn't heard the key fall, but her hand snaked out for it anyway, the reflex automatic. But the corners of her vision were blank. Juliet turned her head up toward Alice and Jonah, struggling to focus. Jonah's hands had lowered to his sides, the fingers of his right hand curled around his gun, his mouth hanging slightly open. It was Alice who was holding a smoking gun, her face unreadable.

They looked at each other for a too-long moment. Juliet felt dizzy from shock and pain and confusion. Ben squirmed on the floor behind her.

------ FLASHFORWARD ------

She _knew_ this would happen. She _knew_, she _gave_ him the suture kit, she _knew_ he would falter, wouldn't be able to risk hurting her and Joe can't handle the look on her face, his mother, his mother _here_ in 1925, down and dazed on the stone slabs of this ancient floor beneath a stupid fucking four-toed foot. Because he couldn't pull the goddamn trigger on Ben.

"I don't suppose I can have your gun, Alice." His mother's voice is slow and thick. Blood's running down from her wound, soaking into her shirt.

"No, you shouldn't suppose that at all," Alice replies. Ben is sputtering on the floor like a suffocating fish. "Oh, come off it, it's just your fucking shoulder," Alice snaps at him.

------ FLASHBACK ------

They lapsed into silence, a pointless but oddly heartbreaking standoff. "I'm going to leave," Alice finally said. "Whatever you do, don't do what Jacob wants."

"Why'd you shoot Ben?" Juliet couldn't help but ask.

"If you don't know, then I feel sorry for you."

Juliet bent slowly, watching Alice the whole time. Picked up Ben's discarded gun from the floor. She had a feeling it would work this time. She raised her face, looked Alice straight in the eyes. "If I ever see you again, I swear I'll kill you."

For some reason Alice reached up and stroked the bridge of her nose. "No you won't, love."

She walked backwards slowly. At the bend in the corridor, she turned and ran. Juliet listened to Alice's footsteps fade.

Then she raised her eyes to meet her son's. "Jonah, please leave us alone for a few minutes."

He gave her a long, silent stare, but he did as she'd asked.

Juliet stood over Ben. Both of them were shaking from pain and blood loss at this point. He put up his good arm, silently asking for mercy.

But she was all out of mercy tonight.

------ FLASHFORWARD ------

Joe barely reaches the corridor before he hears the first gunshot. There's a moment of silence, then two more. Another one. Two more. And then hollow sound of the gun clicking empty. He feels like he's going to vomit on his shoes.

A minute or two later, he hears shuffling footsteps come up behind him. He spins around, holds up his flashlight. "Hey," his mother says softly.

"Hey," he says, trying to calm his breathing. He seriously thinks he's going to puke. Takes a few deep breaths. "You think we're safe in here for awhile?"

"Probably not." They're not going to talk about what she just did.

They tear through the jungle, a too-long run in the rain, and his mother stumbles twice, but they make it over the line of ash. He motions toward her cabin and she's shaking her head. "Where are you? The little you?"

"Alpert has me. It's OK. It'll be OK."

They duck into the tent he'd been using on his visits, and Joe hands her the flashlight, shuffles through his bag, pulls out the flat white plastic box. "Can you sit on the cot?"

She stares at the box in his hands. "You knew," she whispers in shock. "You _knew_."

"I -- I tried to stop it -- " All the while he's thinking, _No, YOU knew_, but that isn't right either. His mother sways slightly on her feet, and he guides her to the cot. She sits on the edge of it and he pulls on the rubber gloves from the kit, finds the antiseptic. "This is gonna burn -- "

"Just do it," she says through gritted teeth.

He may be lousy with a gun, but he inherited her steady hands, at least. She hisses as he disinfects the wound. He threads the needle slowly and starts stitching her up. It's got to be fucking excruciating but she barely moves, staring off into the distance. "It's too much," she finally says.

"You want me to stop for a minute?" He leans away from her slightly to see her face. She's still not meeting his eyes.

"Not that. This. _This._ Everything," she says, finally starting to shake. "It's too big. Knowing everything -- what's going to happen -- trying to change it. It's too much. _I can't do this_."

He takes one of her hands in his free hand. "Ma. Look. Look at me." She looks up, her pupils dilated. She's breathing too fast. "_Yes," _he tells her. "You can_._ You can do it. You already did. And you're gonna do great."

Those were the exact same words she'd told him when he was fifteen.

------ END FLASHFORWARD ------


	80. Passports

_"But down there in the well, where there is no light and only thousand-year-old water, a man has no reason to make mistakes."_

_-_- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

------ FLASHBACK (1925) ------

Juliet felt like they were in a holding pattern, a plane circling the airport waiting and waiting for instructions to land, running low on fuel.

Richard had brought Jonah back near dawn and she tucked him into bed. He said he'd come back for them when he could. Whatever that meant. Joe spent the next couple of days isolated in his tent and when Juliet heard the crackle of static she realized he had a walkie in there with him.

The wound on her collarbone hurt like a bitch. She kept that to herself. Instead she looked through their documentation, spread across the table where she and Dottie had both done too many surgeries and medical procedures to count at this point. Birth certificates for Leah Christina Tobin, DOB 01/16/72 and Jonah Matthew Tobin, DOB 09/23/07. (Sure, whatever). A Florida state drivers license with a fake address in Miami. A pair of Social Security cards. A Visa debit card for Wachovia Bank, expiration date 06/2017. Blue leather-covered U.S. passports already stamped with entrance into Tunisia. The picture of Jonah in his passport wasn't him, of course, but a decent likeness of some other fair-haired little boy. But Juliet recognized the picture in her own passport -- it was from her ID badge at Miami Central University. Freaky. There was a too-modern looking cell phone in there as well, with a huge blank, black screen and no numbered buttons. She decided she would deal with that later.

(If there really was a later.)

The third night after they'd returned, she jerked awake to the sound of chains clanking in the distance, trees being ripped up. The circle of ash was supposed to protect their village, but... But what? It just sounded so close. Too close. And the blinding white flashes started blinking through their windows.

Jonah darted up in bed and grabbed her. "What is that, Mama?" he gasped.

"I don't know, buddy. Get under the bed and stay there. Don't come out!" It was only after the words were out of her mouth that she remembered James' mother had once said something very similar.

Juliet found Dottie in the front room, and they flashed each other a wordless glance before going outside. They weren't alone; dozens of their people were already outside, turning around, circling, looking at the borders of their village. Hardly anyone was speaking. Jonah -- the adult one -- ran up to them and Juliet grabbed his arm, stopped breathing when it occurred to her what they were looking at in the darkness.

It was smoke. Just... smoke. It had completely encircled the village, eight or ten feet high and a quarter of a mile around. Bigger than they could have ever imagined. It was twitching slightly, billowing along the line of ash, looking for a way in."Did you know?" she gasped out. "Did you know it could do this?"

He nodded grimly. "I -- yeah."

She was so rattled she didn't know what he was even talking about until he nodded toward the cabin. Oh right. He'd probably lived through this once before. For some reason she wanted to touch her mark, feel for the dark raised lines on her back. But she stifled the urge.

"In an ideal world, Richard would have come for you already," Joe said grimly. "The smoke can't effect Richard. He's the best one to get you out."

"I want you to leave," she said desperately. "If we get out, Jonah -- Joe -- whatever you want to be called -- you're -- you have to leave."

He nodded again. "Some of the team has been pulling out. Faraday -- he left the day you tried to leave. He and some others. Sam? You remember Sam?" he asked pointedly.

Juliet had no idea what he was getting at. "Yeah, I -- I guess so," she said uncertainly. It was then that she seemed to come back to reality. All around them people had, by this point, started darting around, yelling for reinforcements of the ash line. They busied themselves for awhile, pouring out more ash as the smoke muttered to itself, an unintelligible language of clicks. "It wants me, doesn't it?" she asked Joe in a low voice.

"We have equipment for this. They'll call him off."

"What do you mean, you have equipment?"

"From the future. It's a technological wonderland, Dr. Warrior."

She stared at him for awhile, but he just stared right back. Finally she went back inside to look for her little boy. She tucked him back into bed, spent the rest of the night curled against the bedroom door.

In the morning the smoke was still there. People were getting increasingly anxious. They were so used to getting fresh water from the creeks, and the tarps they used to gather rainwater only held so much. "It's going to choke us out one way or other," Dottie whispered to Juliet over breakfast, quiet so Jonah wouldn't hear.

"Joe's working on it," Juliet promised her.

------ END FLASHBACK ------

**Thursday, July 3, 2014**

"Did you bring the files?"

"Yeah, of course I brought the files," Rachel says. "You only reminded me like six times."

"I like to be thorough."

Rachel unzips the side of her carry-on. "Except you had all the originals in your storage unit and I'm not sure I had all the copies."

"Trust me, you had all the copies. As I said... I like to be thorough." Juliet flips open the first folder in the stack.

"Do I get to know why you wanted...?"

Juliet can't help the eyebrow arch.

"Yeah, that should be painfully obvious, shouldn't it?" Rachel answers her own question, sighing. "You're still trying?"

Juliet shrugs, looking away. "I doubt anything in here could really help -- I mean, I don't even remotely have the same problem you did. But there was one formula that I thought, maybe... Although... I mean, it's not that I have access to experimental drugs these days." But what was experimental in 2001 might actually be available in 2014, right?

Rachel pours them more iced tea and they sip in silence for a minute. Finally Juliet slaps the folder closed. "I'll look at this later."

It's Brian and Julian's first visit to their place in Oregon, now that it's summer and they finally have some time. Rachel had suggested the visit to celebrate the anniversary of Juliet's return, as crazy as it still sounded to even think that she'd been back an entire year. Jonah had lost his first tooth, and then his second. Clementine had successfully lobbied to Cassidy for permission to quit clarinet. She's planning on joining the eighth-grade debate team in the fall. James is finally feeling like he fit it at his new (not-so-new, anymore) job. And Juliet's taking summer classes, mainly in physics. In the spring she'd planted a backyard garden, and now flowers are spilling out everywhere and the tomato plants are taller than Jonah.

She talked to Daniel every few weeks; he's tentatively working on some stuff and calls her with more questions than answers. She'd finally told him she'd seen him on the island in the future and he'd taken it as well as could be expected, although they both expected Charlotte to have a fit (and rightfully so). Charlotte is huge, he'd said. Their baby boy is due in two more weeks.

And overall, life's actually chugging along all right. Except for April. April should pretty much not have existed, Juliet decides, as she and Rachel plop down on lounge chairs to watch the boys and Clementine play a version of Slip & Slide down the hill, with overly elaborate rules involving a hose, a frisbee and a Super Soaker.

No, there's no way in hell April should have existed. On that first Thursday in April, her period had been two days late and her heart had been in her throat when she went to Target and bought a two-pack of pregnancy tests. She felt a little bit like a guilty teenage girl creeping through the aisles; Dharmaville hadn't even had any home pregnancy tests way back when, last time she'd actually been in need of one -- they were just being developed back then, so she'd had a blood test in the Dharma infirmary.

And on that first Thursday in April, she spent her entire drive home convincing herself she wasn't pregnant so she wouldn't be disappointed. But she couldn't even wait to get upstairs; she dashed into the downstairs bathroom, her heart thudding even harder. She'd almost cried in relief at the positive result, spent most of the day walking around grinning to herself. Just before James was due home, she had an almost illogical pang of fear, that maybe she'd misread the test, or the test was wrong, or something had already gone wrong. So she took the second test. Positive again.

When he'd come in the door, she'd practically bounced over to him, beaming, and she knew he could tell almost right away. She just wasn't that much of a bouncer normally. His eyes had skirted around the entryway for Jonah or Clementine, and not seeing them, he met her gaze again, a smile tugging around the corner of his lips. But he waited for her to say it. "I'm pregnant," she whispered to him, biting her lower lip in a futile attempt to stifle the stupid smile, and his face had nearly split into two, he was grinning so hard, squeezing her so tight, and she practically giggled into his neck.

All that week, and the next, and then into the next, she was practically drowning in happiness. And all those sappy secret smiles they kept exchanging. Finally she loved his overprotectiveness, the way he made sure she had enough sleep in spite of her nightmares, was eating properly, taking her vitamins, all those things. At night he'd cup his hand just under her navel and they'd snuggle up together like that, and she'd tell herself at least one thing was going right.

Except eighteen days later, it all went wrong. Juliet felt the first cramp while she was taking notes in her sociology class. It's just the uterus stretching, she told herself. She'd had all kinds of funny twinges and pains when she was pregnant with Jonah, after all. Except they kept coming and going and coming back harder. She left class in a panic, headed to the bathroom, exhaling in relief to find no blood. So she crept back to class, but her mind couldn't follow along anymore. Twenty minutes before the end of the session, she couldn't take it anymore. She gathered up her belongings. Sandra had leaned over to her. "You all right?" she whispered.

"I don't feel so well," Juliet mumbled, and eased out of her seat. By the time she walked in the door of the house, she couldn't remember the drive home anymore.

She'd crept into the upstairs bathroom and waited.

* * *

Supposedly, while they barbecue, James and Brian are talking about whether or not Juliet could ever get away with trying to sue Liemstal, and Brian's saying Juliet will need to get a lawyer if she ever wants to reclaim her identity because she's been using a fake Social Security number, which is technically a crime, although he's sure she'll get out of charges due to her kidnapping and Stockholm Syndrome, blah blah blah.

Meanwhile James is trying to figure out what the hell, exactly, is happening to Jonah's melting veggie burger on the grill, and he also has an eye on Juliet and Rachel in those lounge chairs, and he can't help but notice the files on which Juliet's resting her calves. So Rachel brought the files. There was maybe only one thing in there Juliet thought might be helpful, especially considering she had no lab.

It had been a Monday in April, that much he remembers. The third Monday in April. Looking back he tells himself at least they had two and a half weeks of that incomprehensible bliss before it ended. He'd come home a little bit late that night -- had gotten stuck at the reference desk when the work-study student's class ran over, or so she'd said -- and came home to Clementine and Jonah sprawled out on the couch watching TV.

"Juliet's sick," Clem had said before even saying hello.

His first thought for a goddamn change was not that something had gone terribly, irrevocably wrong. He was actually thinking morning sickness. So far the only thing that had changed, physically, was that she'd been wearing a jogging bra 24-7, and he wasn't even allowed to brush against the area that jogging bra was covering. "OK," he said slowly. They hadn't told anyone she was pregnant yet -- well, Juliet had told Rachel, but that was sort of a given, now that the sisters had finally opened up to each other.

But Juliet and James had wanted to make sure everything would be all right first before they'd told anyone else. Miscarriage rates over age 40 were so high, she'd told him, but at the same time he knew they were both thinking it would never happen to them.

Clementine had frowned. "She hasn't come down for, like, hours." She nodded to Jonah, who was sprawled with his head hanging off the couch, watching Nickelodeon upside down. "I had to get him off the bus."

Something grabbed at James' stomach. "OK, C," he managed. "Thanks, I'll... I'll check on her." He took the stairs two at time.

He found Juliet curled up in a tight ball on the bed, her eyes closed, her face still red from crying. "Hey there," he whispered, sinking one knee into mattress.

She opened her eyes and her face crumpled. "James," she whispered, and that was all she'd needed to say.

James sank down next to her and wrapped his arms around her while she cried. "Why didn't you call me?" he finally managed to get out, his own tears in the corners of his eyes.

"I couldn't say it," she whispered into his chest.

"You OK? You need to go to... to the hospital?"

She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. "I made an appointment for tomorrow morning. Everything's happening pretty normally." He remembered, once again, that in some faraway, distant universe, she'd been an expert in this. She started to cry again and he tightened his arms around her.

"I'm so sorry, Jules."

She'd buried her face into the crook of his neck. "Me too."

And she hadn't even been sure if she'd wanted to try again. She'd given James all sorts of speeches about miscarriage rates and egg quality, but mainly those first couple of weeks after, they stayed up too late, his thumb tracing circles against the back of her hand, and they drank a lot of herbal tea and watched Rachel Maddow's show (which James hated but watched for her) and the 12th incarnation of Doctor Who, and reruns of Robot Chicken (which James loved -- it was pretty much Hugo's favorite -- although it never quite made sense to Juliet).

"At least we know you can get pregnant," he'd said thoughtfully.

Juliet just leaned her head against his shoulder and closed her eyes.

Finally, about three weeks after it all happened, she came to a decision. Sort of. But not. "I don't know if I could go through this again," she whispered to him in the dark. They were laying in bed, the house settling around them. Cat was curled up in between their knees purring like a fucking chainsaw. He didn't say anything for a long time, but his hand found hers in the dark.

"Me either," he finally said. They'd lost this baby, and maybe someday they'd lose Jonah too, and maybe if they got too greedy, they'd lose even more.

"My eggs are too old," she whimpered, and he rolled over to face her in the dark, Cat sulkily thumping to the floor.

"You know I love ya, old eggs and all," he told her, and she'd laughed through her tears.

"Jerk. You can just make babies forever."

"Yeah, well. I just thought it'd be fun to make one on purpose for a change."

"Jonah was on purpose. Well, sort of."

He'd kissed her forehead. "Accidentally-on-purpose." And what about all these past months she'd spent taking her temperature and charting her cycle? All Jonah had taken was a fight and a shortage at the pharmacy.

"I don't know what to do." She'd brought up the egg quality issue again, and how it was a good sign she could get pregnant, but there was no guarantee that this wouldn't happen again. "At my age, any doctor's going to want us to go straight to in vitro, maybe with donor eggs. I don't want to do that. It's too invasive. And we can't really afford it."

"Well, I dunno, maybe we could adopt or somethin'."

"James, you have a criminal record and I didn't exist on paper at this time last year."

"You might have a point there."

And then she'd started talking about all these drugs with long names, and egg follicles, and what they needed was the means to teach her body to determine the right egg to release (and just a single egg at that), but only some of it had really made sense to him. All he knew was they didn't want to end up on any reality shows. And they didn't want to end up with no baby at all.

A couple weeks later, Juliet subscribed to the Journal of Reproduction and Infertility on a whim during a dull afternoon. She downloaded the PDFs and got so wrapped up in them that dinner burned that night. They ordered takeout, and two days later James came home with a pass for her to get access into the medical library at Emporia State.

"Now what am I supposed to do with this?" she'd asked him, trying to hide her smile.

He'd shrugged. "They got a good coffee bar in that library."

"I'm not supposed to have caffeine."

"They got decaf, too."

* * *

But somehow, today, that third Monday of April seems behind them now. It's July 3, 2014. A year ago today, Leah and Jonah Tobin got the first (real) stamps in their passports. A day before American Independence Day, to be sure, but an independence day of sorts, anyway.

After dinner they toast marshmallows in the warm blue dusk of their yard. Jonah tries to catch fireflies. Clementine and Julian watch him for awhile, trying to act too grown up to do the same. But when James hands out sparklers, they remember they're, more or less, still just kids. James and Juliet and Rachel and Brian watch them streak around the yard in the darkness, trailing streams of light behind them, and Juliet's heart soars just seeing them.

It's like that first day in Miami, the day she pulled out of the parking garage in her rental car, seeing all those highways stretching for miles in front of her and then looking in the rearview mirror and seeing Jonah smile at her with all his tiny baby teeth.

One year down. However many to go until this all resolves itself, one way or another. And someday there might be hell to pay, but for now, there's just kids running with sparklers in their yard on a night in summer, and all the most important people in her life are here. At least in one form, if not another.

James catches Juliet daydreaming and dabs some melted marshmallow on her nose.


	81. A Lot of Little Problems

**Yeah, when I said three more chapters? That was a LIE. More like five, including this one. So, four more, after this one.**

**I apologize if there seems to be a lot of logistical talk in this chapter, but I thought maybe some of you were wondering about the time travel station versus the well/Orchid and why Juliet would be using one method to leave and the science team would be using another. Or maybe nobody's wondering about that at all. Just didn't want to leave a random plot hole out there.**

* * *

_"What do you know. You don't know anything."_

- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

- FLASHBACK (1925) -

When she prayed for strength, she prayed to herself.

All throughout that next day, as the rainwater saved in the tarps dwindled, she half-expected some thirsty, disgruntled villager to shove her over the ash line. But these people were on Jacob's side, which meant they weren't going to give his enemy what he wanted.

But she kept thinking either way, these people were screwed. Either the smoke stayed until they were desperate enough for food and water that they did shove her over - in which case, they would introduce a hell of a lot of problems for themselves in the war. And if they waited for the science team to call off the smoke, eventually they could end up drowned by Jacob.

Should Juliet be the one to finally tell them the truth? That they were all being tricked? She'd carried this awful truth with her for two years. But Joe had said it had to be Jacob they followed. None of it made any fucking sense at all. Just another way the island loved taking right and wrong and twisting them up into an incomprehensible fucking mess.

That night she sneaked out of her cabin, crept to the edge of the ash line.

_What do you want._

_You, of course._

_So you can kill me._

_What if you just come with me._

_Why should I come with you._

_Because between me and my brother, I'm the one who has always told you the truth._

_You've tricked a lot of other people. And Jacob hasn't lied to me._

_But he's kept things from you. And you know he's tricked a lot of other people too._

There's no real way for you to win the war, is there. You can't hurt him when he's just water. And you can't just end Jacob's consciousness.

_No. But at least I could make sure my brother has no leverage to drown the island. And then he would be stuck, alone, for all eternity. That would be the worst punishment of all. Come with me._

_Would you kill me._

_Not right away._

_Would you leave these people alone._

_Yes._

She hesitated for only a moment, then started to step forward. Out of nowhere footsteps lunged up behind her, a hand grabbing the back of her shirt, yanking her back hard. The smoke muttered and clicked in disappointment.

"Are you out of your fucking mind?" Joe yelled.

"You watch your mouth, young man!" she snapped automatically, forgetting this version of her son was in his mid-thirties, and could fucking say whatever he wanted.

But he stepped forward, got in her face. "I _told_ you we have equipment to call him off!"

"Then why haven't they used it yet?" she demanded.

He hesitated.

"No one's answering you on that walkie anymore, are they?"

"They'll be back." He sounded a little too insistent, like he was trying to convince himself. "Seriously, Ma, what the _hell_ were you just about to do?"

"I was about to make it so these people don't die for no reason!"

"Hey!" he said fiercely. "There is a kid in that house" - he jabbed a finger back toward her cabin - "who needs you! He needs a mother, not a martyr, you don't just get to sacrifice yourself because you think it's the right thing to do!"

"Then tell me it's the _wrong_ thing to do! Morally."

"Since when did you ever care about morals?" he retorted, and she felt an incomprehensible surge of anger, serious fucking anger. At first she thought it was toward her son; it took only a split-second, though, to realize it was for herself. But he instantly backed off. "I'm sorry - I didn't mean - I just meant - " He looked away.

She felt something unidentifiable slip away from her heart. "You heard me empty my gun into a man asking me for mercy not even a week ago. So tell me, Jonah. Tell me it's the wrong thing to do, going with his brother. To save these people here."

"What I can tell you is that you're the one who told me we needed to stay with Jacob."

"Do you know how this ends?"

He watched her for a long time. The moon was a cool sliver in the sky. "Yes."

"Can you tell me?" She had a feeling he would say no. And she was right.

* * *

He practically dragged her back to the house. "You have to wait," he said, closing the door behind them. "They'll call him off. And you'll leave with Richard."

"Down the well," she said skeptically. She folded her arms, leaned against the wall.

"Down the well."

"Why can't we use the station?"

"Because you use the station, you're still on the island, and so is the smoke. Everyone coming or going from this island still needs a vessel - a plane, a boat, a sub. And that's fine if there's no imminent threat of death by smoke monster."

"I hate to tell you this, but on this island, there's pretty much always the imminent threat of death by smoke monster."

"But you're especially important, so we're not willing to take chances. So will you just _listen_ to me?" He was still irritated.

"I _am,"_ she insisted.

"OK, well, we have a little problem."

_Actually, we have a LOT of little problems, and several huge ones._ "What now?"

"When the team started bailing out, Richard gave Faraday a key to the station. The plan was, they'd time-travel out through the past, and leave the key in the station, for another keyholder to be able to stop by to pick it up."

"So what's the problem with that? ...Wait a second, what do you mean, they time-traveled out through the past?"

"They go into the past to avoid the chaos right now, and leave the island by boat or sub, and then time-travel back to their correct time once they're on the mainland."

She gaped at him. "You people can time-travel within the mainland? You don't have to do it all through the island?"

"Long story. The future, it's a technological wonderland, blah blah blah. Let's just say Faraday's aiming for the Nobel."

"What exactly is the problem with any of that?"

"Well, nothing, except that the key is still down there. So we need another key to even get back into the station."

"Why don't you all just go down the well to leave?"

"Because we can't all go down the well at once. It'll seriously fuck up the island time. Like all those white flashes after your freighter blew up in, what year was that again?"

"2004, I think. Or maybe '5. Right around the new year, anyway."

"Yeah. That was because, um, Ben Linus went down the well," he said awkwardly. Wherever this grown-up version of her son had come from, he'd clearly come from a life where right and wrong seemed a lot more clear to him than they did to her. And she didn't feel one drop of remorse for what she'd done to Ben... even though technically, Ben had saved her life once upon a time - or six years ago, anyway. Juliet wasn't sure what all of that said about her, but it wasn't something she really wanted to think about right now.

"I have a key," she reminded him. The still-healing wound on her collarbone seemed to throb when she said it.

"I know. And you also need to leave the island. Soon."

"What are you getting at?"

"I need to get the rest of my team out. I need you to give me - " The walkie on his hip crackled to life.

"-lo?" A voice crackled. "-ro - but - "

He fumbled with the walkie, drew it up to his mouth, depressed the button. "Hey, who is this? Over!"

"-id - er-"

"Sid?" he yelled.

"Yeah, lis - we got a - ...blem - they're all - ed - aro - "

"WHAT?" he demanded. "Hey, Sid, I can't hear you!"

"- gotta - ...dead - "

"Who's dead? SHIT!" He started shaking the walkie. "Can you get us out of here? The smoke came and we're trapped in - "

" - ay where you are - ...all pulling out, but - aro - "

"You gotta get the smoke to back off, Sid, the - "

"- aro - "

"WHAT?" Joe was practically screaming at the walkie now. "Caro? Caro's here?"

" - two days ag - "

"Wait, Caro's - who's dead, Sid?" A big burst of static in response. "SID!" he yelled._ "Shit!"_

" - call him off - machine - Alp - "

"Can you get to higher ground?" Joe said desperately.

" - hour - get ready - "

The line went dead. "FUCK!" he yelled, smacking the walkie repeatedly into his palm, trying to get it working. It rattled Juliet to see him this upset, he'd been the calmer of them, by far, these past three weeks. But everyone had a breaking point. Juliet knew that as well as anyone.

She laid a hand on his arm. "Joe."

_"Goddammit!"_ he yelled.

"Jonah," she said insistently, her hand still on his arm. "Calm down." She looked straight into his eyes, breathing slowly. The way she always used to get James to calm down. "You don't know who's dead. If Carolyn's here, you'll find her, I promise. It sounds like Richard might be here in an hour, so let's get ready, OK?"

He was still breathing heavy, but he swallowed heavily, trying to calm down. "I have to find her," he said desperately. "What the fuck is she - I told her not to - "

"Looks like you two have something in common, with these insane rescue missions."

He ran a hand over his close-cropped hair. "Jesus. If she - I have to find her. I have to get the rest of them out! Listen, if this works, you have to go with Richard. He'll take you to the well."

"What about you?"

"I gotta find them, they need a key and all the rest are in this camp. They - Jesus fucking Christ, if Caro's here, I..." He looked like he was about to cry all of a sudden. "Do you need to pack or anything?"

"I've been packed for a week. Let's just focus on what to do next."

* * *

Dottie watched them silently, Joe pacing the floor, Juliet sitting very very still on the floor in the corner of the front room, her back against the wall. The boy turned pages of his books too slowly at the table. "You should come with us," Juliet finally said to her.

Dottie's brow furrowed. "I've lived on this island my whole life."

"Do you know what they're really fighting for?" Juliet asked in a low voice.

"Ma," Joe said sharply. His footsteps stilled.

"I - "

Richard burst through the door without knocking. "Ready to go?" He looked rattled for a change. There was a splatter of mud on one of his pant legs.

"Your clothes need ironing," Juliet said dryly. And she had dirty, crazy-lady hair by now. So what.

Richard gave her a sarcastic look, then nodded at Joe. "Can you contact them?"

Joe's shaky breathing was back. "I hope so." He brought the walkie back to his mouth. "Anyone there? Sid? Over."

"Yeah - all read - two min - "

Joe nodded. "This is it."

"Dottie?" Juliet asked.

"I'm staying. And yes, Juliet, I do know. It'll be OK for me."

"But how do you...?"

Dottie's eyes slid a fraction of the way toward Joe, then snapped back to Juliet. "I just do."

- END FLASHBACK -

James is sitting in the bleachers of the non-pushy parents' section at Jonah's T-ball game, in the sporadic drizzle of yet another washed-out late summer afternoon. Damn the Pacific Northwest. He hears footsteps on the aluminum behind him, and for a split-second he's reminded of the day Alpert showed up at Clementine's soccer game years ago.

But the legs that suddenly come into view are a hell of a lot sexier than Richard fuckin' Alpert's, and Juliet plops down onto the bench. She screws up her face in horror, and James laughs. "Yeah, you probably shoulda dried off that bench before you sat down."

"Well, _now_ you tell me."

She's holding a stack of files on her lap, nods toward the field. "How's he doing?"

"Well, uh... he's good at a lotta things, he don't need to make a livin' in T-ball."

Juliet grins. "Fair enough."

They sit in silence for awhile, even though he's itching to ask about the paperwork on her lap. She hasn't shown up at T-ball in weeks, not even on Saturdays. When she's not under cars or off at physics classes, she's been holed up in the medical library at Emporia State.

After a few more minutes she tilts her head toward him. "James?"

"Yes, Blondie?" he responds, playing along.

"Want to help me con a fertility doctor?"

"Absolutely."


	82. Meth Lab

**This chapter is dedicated to cdgeiger for suggesting the flashforward!  
**

_

* * *

"I looked at other couples and wondered how they could be so calm about it." _

-- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

**Tuesday, July 22, 2014**

Juliet is very still and expressionless (of course) in the waiting room, staring straight ahead. Of course James keeps jiggling his foot, and eventually her eyes slide over to his, a smile tugging at the corner of her lips.

"Ford?" the receptionist finally calls, and Juliet gives him a look that approximates to _Ready? _like they're about to go shoot up some Hostiles in the jungle. And he places his hand on her lower back, nods at her.

She'd picked the doctor based on recommendations from online message boards; other patients of Dr. Peterson had praised him for the fact that he always let them feel like they were involved in their care, and he was careful to ensure that his patients made their own decisions based on the information they had. Of course, it was pretty unlikely that any other patients made _quite_ as many of their own decisions as Juliet was going to try to make.

Dr. Peterson shakes their hands, offers them a seat, asks them a long series of questions about their medical histories, Juliet's previous pregnancies and Jonah's birth. She hands over the charts she's been keeping of her cycle. Juliet is exceedingly quiet and demure the entire time, part of the plan they've worked out.

"First things first, we're going to schedule you both for lab workups to rule out any obvious problems. Leah, we'll do your exam today and then Marta at the front desk can make those lab appointments for you both when you leave."

"You don't... Do you think we're going to need IVF?" Juliet says worriedly. Another part of the act.

"Well, a lot of other REs would probably say yes, but I think it's too early right now to say that with any certainty."

This is James' cue. "There's always..." he trails off, turning to Juliet.

Juliet rests a hand on his arm. "James," she admonishes. "Let's just wait to see what Dr. Peterson finds."

The doctor's curiosity is clearly piqued. "What is it?"

"No, it's nothing," Juliet says, feigning embarrassment. "You're the doctor, and..."

"But what about what your sister..." James trails off again.

Juliet flashes an embarrassed smile at Peterson. "It's just... My sister was an REI specialist, before she decided to stay home with her kids. She did a lot of research, and..."

"Go on," Peterson encourages her.

"No, it's just... Well, she just, she, um, she looked over my chart and my history and everything, and she wrote out some things she thought might work." She shrugs hesitantly. "But..."

"You got it in your bag, don't ya?" James interjects.

"James, no, I'm sure Dr. Peterson will figure out what we need. I told my sister not to get involved." She flashes another embarrassed smile over the desk between them.

"Well, I don't know how much it would help, if you didn't have a workup she could base it on, but I'd certainly be willing to take a look," the doc offers.

Juliet smiles shyly and pulls out the folder, slides it across the desk. Peterson reaches for it, flips it open, scans down the page. He purses his lips, reading, but after a moment his eyebrows shoot up. "What's your sister's name?" he asks suddenly. "Has she ever published this?"

"Oh, I don't... I don't know all that much about her work," Juliet mumbles.

"OK, well..." The doctor twists in his seat, clearly excited about what he's looking at. "Let's do your workups. These first two drugs, there could definitely be something in that. This third one, though, that's never been used with the first two -- it'd need to go through some extensive testing first. It's not going to be something we're able to consider at this point. But we might be able to substitute something else for it."

Juliet had already told James all of that. "He's not going to be able to give me this third one," she'd said.

"So why are you puttin' it on the list?" he'd asked.

"Well, as far as I can tell, it's never been combined with the first two before, but I'll probably be able to tell by his reaction whether he thinks it could work. I don't want any potential grandkids to mutate. And anyway, this drug is available without a prescription in Canada, so I already ordered it online."

"Jesus," was about all James could think to respond.

She'd just shrugged nonchalantly. "Now, there's a fourth component that I'm _really_ not going to be able to include on the stuff I give him. So I ordered that online, too."

"Jesus," he'd repeated.

Juliet had flashed him a grin. "Trust me, religion has nothing to do with it."

* * *

A few weeks later, James walks into the bedroom to find Juliet perched on the desk chair. Her hair is tied back, and she's wearing rubber gloves and is dripping an eyedropper full of liquid into a test tube. Across the desk there's a series of test tubes lined up, a couple of bottles of prescription drugs and the injection kit Peterson had given her. Plus the stuff she ordered online, which -- as he's already told her -- is freaking the hell out of him, because how the hell are they supposed to know if it's safe? ("I'm supposed to still be alive in twenty years, remember? I'm assuming that means I don't blow up the house any time soon," she'd told him.)

James can't help himself. "You look like you're runnin' a meth lab in here."

She arches an eyebrow, doesn't take her attention away from the equipment in her hands. "Well, if this works, it'll end up _costing_ us tons of money someday. Toys, clothes, tuition. On the other hand, we could actually be making pretty decent money off a meth lab."

"Well, maybe we could try that next."

She grins, that devious Other look crossing over her face for just the tiniest of seconds.

"So if what you were doin' to Rachel was considered unethical and shady, what would you call this?"

"Taking the situation into my own hands." She bends back over her work.

------ FLASHFORWARD (2015) ------

"I wanna kill that doc for tellin' you that," James grumbles as he starts handing pillows to Juliet.

She makes a grumpy face and starts tucking the pillows around her back. "It's not the doctor's fault the baby is probably gonna weigh about twenty-two pounds."

"Only nine, Jules."

"Yeah, you tell me how it feels to hear that in few days, you're going to be pushing out something that weighs nine pounds. And then you can exaggerate all you want."

She has a point there. "You want another pillow?"

Juliet pauses to consider this; she's lying on her left side and there are already four piled up against her, from the backs of her knees up to her lower back. She sighs. "I think this is as good as I'm gonna get tonight."

He flicks off the lights and his first inclination is to tug her over to him, but that won't quite work with the village of pillows she's engulfed in, and anyway, she's so damn overheated and uncomfortable these days. They'd gone to her 38-week appointment today and the obstetrician had told them she was probably going early, could be just a couple more days, even. Juliet had called Rachel from the parking lot at the doctor's office, frantically crying (damned hormones) and Rachel had booked a flight for the following morning.

But Juliet's hand reaches out to find his in the dark. "I'm scared."

"You done this before. And you're gonna do great." He smooths her hair off her face.

"I just keep thinking about the way it was last time. I mean, technically, everything went smoothly, but... It was just so hot, and I ended up so dehydrated, and I was just so damn depressed."

"I'm gonna be with ya, Rachel's gonna be here with Jonah. And we're gonna have us a party at the hospital, after we have our little baby girl real soon."

"A big baby girl," she says tearfully. Oh, hormones.

"A big-little baby girl."

"I grew Jonah on oatmeal and bananas. A nice, tiny baby."

"What, no boar?"

She laughs a little, now. "Boar made me throw up when I was pregnant with Jonah."

"No wonder the kid's a goddamn vegetarian. Meanwhile, boar almost made _me_ puke and I ain't never been pregnant."

"Well, if I ever get around to working in a lab again, maybe I could try out some experiments on you." Juliet shifts around, trying to get comfortable. Her belly brushes against his arm and he lays his hand across the smooth, warm skin.

"You asleep yet? 'Cause I'm pretty sure you're dreamin'."

* * *

James brings Jonah out to the airport to pick up Rachel. She's been visiting pretty much every other month since Christmas, determined that for once, one of them will be there for the other during a pregnancy. "Hey, almost-big-brother!" she greets Jonah, who throws his arms around her.

"If you want to take the baby home with you, you can," Jonah tells her earnestly.

Rachel laughs. "Sibling rivalry starting early, huh?"

"What's sibling revelry?" Jonah asks.

"Somethin' that would probably be a lot better than what we got now," James says, giving Rachel a quick hug hello. The kids' reactions had totally surprised both him and Juliet. Clementine, who'd made her opinions clear on such things long ago, had ended up warming to the idea pretty quickly in the end -- although she'd also said she would have preferred another boy, considering her sisters on her mother's side were always getting into her stuff.

But Jonah was anxious and suspicious, although all the questions were pretty easy -- past the "How'd the baby get in there?", anyway, but James and Juliet think they _finally_ have all that straightened out with him, thank God. "Where's the baby gonna sleep?" he'd asked. "What if the baby cries a lot?" "How does the baby eat in there?" "But what about yucky diapers?" "Can Mama still come to my T-ball games with a baby?" "Do I have to share my toys?" There were just a hell of a lot of them, and then he'd been extra clingy and attention-seeking lately.

Most weeknights when they didn't have Clem, James would come home to an exhausted Juliet, who'd shoot him a look along the lines of,_ "Please _entertain him so I can go lie down." Weeks they had Clementine, though, were better. Clem was stepping up to be a pretty damn good big sister, and she was obviously going out of her way to play with Jonah and get him to leave Juliet alone for a few minutes, and answer his questions when she could. "You know how prouda you I am, ladybug?" he'd asked Clementine recently.

Clem had grinned. "Yep," she'd answered cockily.

"An' you're real modest, too," he'd replied.

* * *

It's only been a couple hours, but the house is ridiculously clean when they get back, the coffee table cleared of Jonah's toy farm animals, the floors vacuumed. Even the framed photos they have in the entryway look like they've been dusted, and Juliet's mopping the kitchen floor enthusiastically. In fact, it's the biggest burst of energy in her that James can remember seeing in weeks. _Oh, Jesus. _He remembers them talking about this in the birthing class they'd taken.

"Aw, you're nesting!" Rachel exclaims, moving forward to give Juliet a hug. Juliet has to lean forward awkwardly to hug her sister, what with the belly getting in the way, which to James is pretty much the cutest thing ever.

"I am not," Juliet retorts. "It's just... the floors were really dirty and the books were crooked on the shelves and the bathrooms...." She pauses when she realizes the three of them are staring at her.

"I give you 48 hours, little sis," Rachel predicts. "Tops."

* * *

James doesn't want to go to work the next day, but Juliet finally shoos him off. "Rachel's here and I'd rather you saved your days off for when you actually need them," she tries to remind him. Meanwhile the two of them keep looking at her like a ticking time bomb ("Which you _are," _Rachel had reminded her). The truth is, she _has_ been feeling a little bit crampy this morning, but she's anxious enough already about the whole thing without the two of them starting in on her.

"James, it's fine," Rachel assures him. "We're going to go get pedicures today."

"We're what?" Juliet says skeptically. "I can't even see my own feet."

"You'll see them once you're pushing, and then you're gonna be thinking,_ 'Why_ didn't I listen to Rachel about the pedicures?'"

"Number one, there is no way in hell I'll actually be thinking that. Number two, don't ever use the word 'pushing' in a joke again."

James' attention is bouncing between the two, but he looks like he's just barely holding in his laughter. "I'm leavin'," he finally chokes out. "Have fun today."

* * *

Once Jonah's off to school, they go out for brunch, and by the time they're at the spa and her feet are in the warm bubbly water, she has to admit it was a pretty good idea. Juliet and her sister are reading insanely idiotic magazines and it's all silly and comfortable and fun. Except she is definitely feeling a little bit crampier than before. She hadn't eaten a whole lot at brunch, which hadn't escaped Rachel's attention. By the time the nail tech has gotten to the polish stage, Juliet can't quite avoid making a face as a harder contraction grips her belly.

"Hey, you OK?" Angel, the nail tech, asks anxiously.

Rachel practically drops her magazine. "Jules?"

"It's nothing," she says, but her words come between gritted teeth.

"That's not nothing!" Angel laughs.

Just as fast as the pressure came on, it passes. "I'm OK," she assures them.

"I'll finish quick," Angel promises.

* * *

They go back to the house, and Juliet just starts pacing (_OK, more like waddling, thankyouverymuch_) in circles. Rachel's offered to call James about ten times already.

"I'm not convinced this is really labor."

Rachel looks at her like she's an idiot. "Have you _seen_ the look on your face when you have a contraction?"

"No, of course not."

"Well, I have, and trust me, you're going into labor."

"At least my feet will look good when I'm pushing."

"Hey, how come _you_ get to joke about it?"

* * *

Jonah comes home from school at 3:30 and Juliet's lying bent over against the couch pillows at this point. Rachel's been timing the contractions and she's definitely down to six minutes.

"What are you doing?" he asks anxiously.

"The baby's getting ready to be born," Rachel tells him.

"Really? Can we call Clementine?"

"Not yet, kiddo, we gotta tell your dad first."

"Rachel?" Juliet knows how weak her own voice sounds. "I think you should call him."

* * *

When James' cell phone rings, he jumps a mile. It's Rachel's number. He ducks back into his office. "What's goin' on?"

"Six minutes apart."

"What? You're kiddin' me!"

"Yeah, this is my idea of a joke. Hilarious, huh?"

"Can she still talk through the contractions?"

"Yeah, but it's all cursing. Come home before she permanently scars your son."

"Sonuvabitch! Why didn't you call me sooner?" he demands, pulling up his Outlook mail and setting the paternity leave away message he's had pre-programmed for weeks.

"She didn't want me to. Of _course,_ right? Listen to me, drive carefully. Only one family member in the hospital at a time, OK?"

"OK, OK," he says, yanking his car keys out of his pocket. He exhales a low, shaky breath.

* * *

Of course, by the time he gets home, the contractions have slowed, and Juliet is crying on the couch. "Hey, hey, hey," he whispers to her.

"They just -- and then -- " she stammers, sobbing harder. Sonuvabitch, this is _just_ like they'd told them at the birthing class. He smooths her hair away from her face, whispering to her about meeting their baby, but she just cries harder. Then her whole body tenses and she starts gasping, gripping the underside of her belly, and he feels completely horrible, because _he_ did this to her -- well, she did too, thanks to her little pseudo meth lab upstairs on the desk, but even so -- and he tries to place his hand over hers on her belly, but with her free hand she slaps his away, hard, and oh yeah, this is definitely labor.

* * *

They leave for Good Samaritan (same hospital where he'd proposed to her, well, sort of, anyway). It's 6 p.m. Of course it has to be rush hour. Juliet feels like all her peripheral vision is gone, but she kisses Jonah goodbye and squeezes Rachel's hand. James helps her ease into the Jeep.

As they creep forward in rush hour traffic, he tells her, "It'll all be over soon." He tries to sound reassuring, she can tell, as she arches and squirms against the uncomfortable seat.

"Not soon enough," she bites out between gritted teeth. _"Sonuvabitch!"_

* * *

After she gets her epidural, Juliet tells the anesthesiologist she loves him.

"I get that a lot," he tells her, winking, and heads out to make other laboring women's dream come true.

Juliet flops her head against her pillow. "I feel like I can actually function again," she breathes out to James.

"Permission to approach?" he asks.

What the hell is he even talking about? "Of course," she answers, confused. "Why wouldn't you?"

"'Cause every time you have a contraction, you've been smackin' me away." He sits down on the edge of her bed, takes her hand.

"No, I haven't!"

"Trust me, you have."

She feels another contraction coming on, but it's muffled, like it's hiding underwater. Then again, she knows what it's like to hide underwater. Juliet leans her head on his shoulder. "What time is it?"

James twists around to check. "'Bout 10:30. You should try to get some sleep while you can."

"I am really, really glad you're here this time. Well, you and the anesthesiologist."

He kisses her forehead. "Wouldn't have missed it for the world."

* * *

By 5 a.m., the pain is back and she is hoarse from the noises she's making, _please god baby girl please be born soon _and she is gripping James' hand so tightly it's hurting her own hand, much less his, but of course now she's screaming for Rachel and there's nothing they can really do about that at 5 a.m. and she wants her mother who is long gone with a rock on her gravestone and she is trying to focus on James' face but her vision is going blurry. James' face is full of agony seeing her like this, and she's shaking uncontrollably, she hears the nurses telling her _push, push_, but she's been pushing for far too many minutes and that's all she can think about is pushing so they should just stop already telling her to push because she fucking _is_, goddammit.

* * *

Their daughter is born at 5:19 a.m. on May 30, 2015. Chubby curled-up legs, round baby belly, her head nearly bald except for a small tuft of hair sticking up in the center of her head like a mohawk, just like Jonah's.

Eva weighs 8 pounds, 15 pounces. Of course. Juliet's not even sure of the sounds she's making anymore when the doctor lays the baby on her chest but she's crying and the baby is crying and there's James and oh, he's crying too, and she's trying to talk but all she can say is some approximation of _look, look,_ and he's kissing her with their tears mixing up over their faces _oh my god she's really here._

_

* * *

_

For God's sakes, he can't stop crying, but then again, the hospital staff has probably seen a hell of a lot worse. Juliet's teeth are chattering, which would be freaking the hell out of him except for those birthing classes (thank God she'd talked him into those; he reminds himself for the millionth time to thank her later), and a nurse is wiping gunk off the baby, who's lying against Juliet, nursing. James looks at the tiny pink shell of the baby's right ear that somehow spirals just the way Juliet's does. She's got the most impossibly tiny fingers. For once he's going to be there from the beginning, and he can tell already that Eva's the best thing that's ever happened to him, or, well, at least she's got a solid tie with Juliet and Clem and Jonah.

"D-do you want to hold her?" Juliet asks when the baby is done, and he finds himself surprised to be hesitating.

"I..."

"C'mon, Dad, don't be afraid," the nurse tells him, and she scoops the baby out of Juliet's arms and hands her to James. She's heavier, more solid than he would have expected, and for about the hundredth time in the past few minutes, he can't believe that Juliet was actually lugging around this extra being inside of her all these months.

He can't stop looking at the baby, except when he's looking at Juliet, whose teeth eventually stop chattering. After awhile the hospital staff is done with the stuff they've been doing to her that James has been trying to distract her from. "You want to take her back?" he asks.

"Yeah," she says softly, easing over to lie on her side. James tucks the bundle into the crook of her elbow, kneels down to press his forehead against Juliet's.

"I love you," he tells her, and he can't remember that ever being any more true.

"Well, good, 'cause I love you back," she tells him very seriously.

------ END FLASHFORWARD ------

**Tuesday, October 7, 2014**

Juliet's been unusually quiet at dinner tonight, and James is actually a little bit worried. She's been injecting herself with all those damn drugs for just about two months now, and he knows she hasn't always been feeling that hot as a result. Although, now that he's thinking about it, she looks better tonight for some reason, but her cheeks are flushed and she's not quite paying attention to the story Jonah's telling.

Jonah finally gives up. "Can I call Clementine and can she come over tonight and play Nintendo?" he asks James.

"Uh, you can call her, but it's up to her and her mom what she's doin' tonight."

Jonah rockets off his chair and dives for the phone.

"Hey! Ask if you can be excused, first. An' take your plate to the sink, shortstack."

The kid heaves an exaggerated sigh and picks up his plate. "May I please be excused?" he recites in a bored voice.

"Yes, you may," James replies, bowing his head to joke with the kid.

Juliet smiles absently, her eyes somewhere else. She rises to start clearing plates the rest of the plates, but James is starting to get a little bit freaked out. She's just... she's too distant tonight, and he's wondering if there's something wrong, something bothering her, some memory of the island that's hitting a little bit too close tonight. He lunges out of his seat, grabs her wrist. "You OK?" he asks her softly.

She nods her head, not quite meeting his eyes. She glances over to Jonah, who's on the phone with his sister. Finally James lets go of her wrist and they finish clearing the table. Jonah hangs up. "Yay, she's coming over!" he sings out in happiness, and thunders down the basement stairs.

James fixes his gaze back on Juliet, but her blank expression has been replaced by a small smile. The kind of smile that wants to be big, he can tell. "You wanna tell me what...?" He trails off when the smile gets bigger, and oh God, he just... he _knows._

She takes both his hands in hers. "It worked," she tells him. "It worked."


	83. Birmingham

_"It was the earthquake that shook the whole world, and every single thing was destroyed. But this isn't the scary part. That part always comes right before I wake up. I am crawling, and then suddenly, I remember: the earthquake happened years ago." _

- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

Forces and motion energy suck. Rotational dynamics? Yeah, they suck, too.

Juliet is so goddamn cranky this morning and she knows it's technically all hormones but the truth is she's forcing herself to take these physics classes and she completely fucking hates them. This just isn't her kind of science. And she's got way too much reading to do because she signed up for _way_ too many courses this semester, and there's all that calculus homework too, and oh good lord, what the hell was she even thinking?

Things would have been better if she hadn't been laid out with headaches three days last week, and she'd gotten too far behind. She'd even seen a neurologist awhile back, finally; James had been nagging her about it for ages. She'd gotten a prescription for two kinds of migraine medications, which didn't work (of course) and she'd had an MRI, which had come out completely normal (not that she was surprised).

Now the words on the page swim before her eyes and wow does she ever want caffeine or a six-hour nap right now. She moves her pencil over the page, forcing herself to stay awake.

"Mama...?"

A welcome distraction if she's ever heard one. She looks up from the kitchen table and Jonah's hovering in the doorway holding his pillow. He'd never gotten attached to a toy or blanket the way most children do, and she can only assume it had something to do with the fleeting nature of their possessions on the island. But when he's sick, he holds onto his pillow, and he was home from school today with a slight fever.

"Hey buddy, how was your nap?" She reaches out; he approaches and she kisses his forehead. "You feel cooler."

"Can I watch TV? Do I have to go to school tomorrow?"

She stifles the urge to laugh. "Let's just take things a little bit at a time. You want some lunch? Grilled cheese and tomato?"

"Yeah. Can you put toothpicks in?"

"I can do that." Juliet busies herself at the counter, slicing tomato and putting the pan on the stovetop to heat. When she emerges from the pantry with the bread, she sees Jonah kneeling on his chair, looking over her textbook.

"What's this mean?" he asks, pointing to the symbol-heavy formula for angular momentum. "That's a funny-looking E."

"It's a sigma," she says before she can stop herself. "It's not important, Jonah. It's boring."

Jonah just shakes his head. "It looks like a secret language," he says, awed.

_We already have a secret language_, she tells him in Latin, and he shrugs, but doesn't turn away from the page. She stands there a moment before she slides the book away from him and closes it, ignoring his whine. "Go get Charlotte's Web," she suggests, turns around to open the bread wrapper, a lump in her throat.

- FLASHFORWARD (2023) -

Jonah blows his whistle hard when Kelvin gives him the signal, and they start getting everyone out of the pool. The little kids whine and he shrugs at their disappointed parents, but lightning's lightning and that's the way it's gonna be. From the look of the clouds overhead, the 15-minute recess probably won't be enough, and he and Kelvin jump down from their chairs, fold up the umbrellas.

Fat raindrops are starting to fall now, and Mr. Franco gets on the PA system, announces the pool's closing for the rest of the afternoon. Jonah sighs - they don't get paid for hours when weather shuts down the pool, and now he's gonna have to ride his bike home in the rain besides (unless he wants to call his dad, which he kinda doesn't).

Kelvin rolls his eyes as they go through the motions of shutting the place down. "My mom's still here with Felix, you wanna come over? She can drive us."

"Yeah, OK." Not like Jonah was really looking forward to going home right now, considering his father's been Mr. Doom and Gloom ever since they moved to Birmingham six weeks ago. Besides, making friends in the summertime hasn't been easy, and Kelvin and the guys on their swim team are pretty much all Jonah has right now.

It's weird, too, making friends in this place. The people here were nice enough, probably friendlier than in Portland, technically, but something about Portland's overachievers, seemingly all techies or academics, had suited him just fine. Plenty of AP classes and after-school programs to cut his teeth on. But here he'd joined the swim team, taken the lifeguarding test, just to have something to do (and all these Southern chicks in bikinis aren't half-bad to look at, anyway).

And truth be told, their house was kind of awesome, what with the dock and all in the back, and the Little Monster had plenty of other Little Monsters in their neighborhood to keep her busy, and he's happy for her. But mostly this sports-focused, uber-Christian set of folks was a little bit jarring to him, to probably most of their family, and he knew they were all still acting like Jasper, Alabama wasn't 45 minutes northwest of where they were living right now.

A couple weeks after they'd moved, Clem had come to visit and his mother had taken the two of them to see their grandparents' graves. Not Eva - she's too little to keep it a secret from their father. Clem had frowned in the cemetery. "Why the hell would they have buried them together?" she'd demanded.

"I don't know, honey," his mother had said.

The real issue wasn't the culture shock, all these people with their accents slow and sweet as honey; it was his father holing up in their home office whenever he wasn't working at the main library of Birmingham-Southern College (Warren Ford's alma mater, of all damn places). And he was shuffling around the house late at night when the rest of them were supposed to be sleeping.

"He's just acting so... _mental," _Jonah had complained to his mother the other day. _  
_

She was kneeling in the area she'd selected for her garden, trying to get things started a little too late in the season. "Hey!" She'd jabbed a finger in his direction. "That's not a nice thing to say."

"Well, it's true," he muttered.

His mother leaned back on her heels, looked him straight in the eye. "I don't know how much of this you really remember, but I was pretty messed up after you and I got back from the island."

Yeah. Yeah, he remembered. He looked away from her, then back again.

His mother's gaze never wavered. "Your father's here in Alabama, for _me_. So if he wants to fall apart right now, I'm going to let him."

* * *

Anyway, if there's one thing he's learned from his mother, it's how to blend in anywhere he needs to. And if there's one thing he's learned from his father, it's acting tough even when you're not feeling it. So he puts on a good-enough show with these guys from the swim team (who for some reason all insist on calling him Joe, and although he's never been called that before, he goes with it). These dudes are all into sports when the only thing Jonah really likes is swimming, and he doesn't know what'll happen once football season starts, because he doesn't give a shit about football, except that maybe he can meet some other not-too-nerdy science geeks once the school year starts (or so he hopes).

Kelvin's a decent friend, anyway, even though his annoying five-year-old brother is probably a good runner-up to Jonah's own annoying eight-year-old sister in terms of Supreme Annoyingness, and when they get to Kelvin's house they call Domino's and hole up in the basement watching ESPN.

Eventually the pizza arrives and Kelvin's mom makes them let Felix downstairs, and the kid sits on the floor making a mess with his pizza over a stack of paper towels. Kelvin has the new Wii 4 and that thing is cosmically awesome, no joke, so once he and Kelvin are done eating they start playing a new shooter game (Jonah kinda sucks at it, though) while Felix looks on, occasionally demanding a turn. Which they ignore.

"Finish your pizza first, twerp," Kelvin orders.

Felix sighs, aggravated, and takes another bite. "I'm done now, can I please please PLEASE play with Joe?"

What is it about that kid, that sentence, that seems so ungodly familiar? It's creepy, is what it is. Jonah turns his head, looks at Felix. "What'd you just say?"

"I said, I'm done now, an' it's _my turn!" _Felix reaches for the controller with a sauce-covered hand, and Kelvin yelps in protest, telling him to go upstairs first and wash up. Jonah feels like he's just been punched. _I'm done now, can I please please PLEASE play with Joe._

Upstairs in the light-soaked first-floor bathroom of Kelvin's house, Jonah locks the door and leans forward into the mirror, staring at his face. He tilts his head, squinting, staring at his close-cropped dark blond hair, just a shadow of minor stubble across his jaw, the blue eyes just like his mother's, the slightly asymmetrical cleft chin.

He feels like he can't even breathe. "Sonuvabitch," he mutters to his reflection. To Joe's reflection. Trying to pretend his heart isn't pounding.

* * *

Kelvin's mom offers to drive him home, it's still raining a little, after all, but he just shakes his head and grabs his bike. He doesn't bother with the stupid helmet, just leaves it dangling from the handlebars bumping into his right knee every time it comes up. It's three miles home, and he almost skids out in the mud, but he forces his legs down repeatedly and just keeps going and dammit, his parents knew all along, or at least his mother did anyway, and he's supposed to grow up and go back to the_ island?_

He throws his bike down with force onto their front lawn, stands on the porch for half a minute to shake the water from his hair before he figures he's soaked enough to drip on the floor no matter what he does out here.

The first floor is quiet and still, and when he walks to the back of the house, he discovers the dining room crowded with pushed-out chairs, all covered in sheets and blankets. The Little Monster's green comforter is spread out over top of the dining room table.

"Hey!" he barks.

Eva pops her head out, wearing her bright blue bike helmet covered in ladybug stickers. She narrows her eyes suspiciously at him. "Are you a Hostile?" she demands.

_Not this again. _"What kind of bedtime stories has Dad been telling you lately?"

"Just answer the question," she says coolly. "Because I have my laser guns, and my attack cat is in the fort with me, and - "

"Where's Ma?" he interrupts.

"Mommy's still at work. You owe me a dollar."

"Yeah, why do I owe you a dollar?"

"'Cause that's privileged information I just gave you, and you know what else, I have my laser, and - "

"Eva! Where's Dad?" he demands.

Her lower lip sticks out. "In the office upstairs."

He thunders upstairs. Of course the door is closed. He bangs on it, listening as the desk chair rolls across the floor. His father swings the door open, still sitting in the chair. Looks at his soaked clothes. "Rained out? You shoulda called me, it ain't safe to be ridin' around in this weather! When I didn't hear from ya I figured you'd be gettin' a ride with Kelvin."

"You could have called me, you know," Jonah tells him. "I have a phone."

His father at least has the good sense to wince. "I'm sorry, buddy boy. You're right. Your baby sis still re-creatin' Fort Ticonderoga down here?" His father's eyes flicker back over to the computer screen, open on a word-processing program. What the hell is he _doing_ up here all the time?

"I guess so," he mutters. Glares at his father.

"God, I know that look," his father smirks at him.

"I'm not trying to be funny."

"Neither'm I. What's up?"

"I _know."_

"Yeah, you know what, exactly?"

Jonah feels like he wants to scream and yell and punch the wall. But he also knows, somehow, deep down, that's just not his style. "I know about Joe. On the island. I _know._ I know I'm him."

Something washes over his father's face then. Fear or relief or surprise or what, he doesn't know. "You call your mom?"

"No."

"I'm gonna call her now, get her to come home. OK?"

"Fine, whatever."

His father stands awkwardly, gives him a hug even though Jonah's still soaked. "It's gonna be OK, you know."

"Easy for you to say," he mutters, and leaves to go put on dry clothes.

* * *

James listens to the angry footsteps clatter off. Heart thudding, he dials Juliet's work number.

"Hey you, what's up?" She sounds like she's in far too good a mood for all this. Well, he certainly knows how to wreck _that._

"You gotta come home."

"What? What's wrong, James?"

"It's Jonah. It happened. What we thought - happens, happened."

There's a long pause. "So soon?" Her voice is pleading.

His heart sinks at having to tell her this, knowing that it's she who's going to have to come home and talk to the boy, answer his questions. Tell him it won't be so bad. Figure out how to manage it all. How it's not possible to change it. How this is it. "Guess so."

"Did he say how?"

In the background James can hear rustling as she gathers her things together. "No," he says.

She lets out a long sigh. "I'm leaving now."

* * *

Of course this has to be happening now, she thinks, watching herself nervously in the rearview mirror at the first red light she encounters. James is already having a hard-enough time being stuck back here in Alabama, she's working far too many hours, and now this. And she doesn't know what she's supposed to tell Jonah to make any of this seem OK.

The island hardly even seems real to her anymore, she's been off for ten years and she knew this day was coming but (_but what?_)... It's just that all of it had grown into a small, hard pebble rattling around in the back of her shoe, and she was able to ignore it for increasingly long amounts of time until something shifted slightly and it was jabbing into her all over again.

_It's going to be OK, _she silently tells herself._ It's going to be OK. It's going to be OK._

(Her hands are clammy on the steering wheel anyway.)

* * *

It's stopped raining, and so she finds her son out on the dock, pitching rocks into the water. "Are those my landscaping stones?" she asks by way of greeting, and he turns and glares at her. "Sorry," she says softly. "I guess this is no time to try to be funny."

"You could have told me sooner," he mutters, hurling another one out.

"Would you have wanted to know?" She kicks off her shoes, sits on the edge of the dock, touches her toes to the surface of the rippling water.

"What was it like?" he asks.

"Weird," she admits. "Very, very weird. Kind of wonderful, too."

"Well, ain't that cute," he sulks.

"Jonah, I'm sorry. Things are - well, things are kind of circular when you're me. Or you, I suppose, now. There's not really a beginning or an end to it."

"So I just - grow up and - become some kind of jungle danger scientist?"

"Sort of. Not really. You're kind of awful with a gun, it turns out." She feels her lips quirk up into a smile. Amazing that in this in-between time, any of it could seem remotely funny.

"Don't - don't tell me that stuff," he says uncomfortably. He sits down on the dock, eases off the edge and drops into the water, letting it close over his head.

She sits there very still and waits. When he surfaces, he floats on his back, still fully dressed, his loose T-shirt a sort of halo around him. He stares up at the sky.

Juliet hears James open the back door. She twists around, holds up a hand that things are OK, mostly, but points down toward the water, and he nods and ducks back into the house. But a minute later he's up behind her, tosses her a towel and goes back inside.

Finally Jonah comes out of the water, dripping, and pulls his shirt over his head. She holds out the towel to him. For some reason she thinks, then, of ten summers ago, a day in Miami, her sprawled on Rachel's couch with an unfathomable headache, and the way she smoothed down her son's sticking-up-everywhere hair after he'd gotten out of the pool. The way he'd hovered near that couch, dripping, anxious, and it had been maybe the first time she'd even really looked at him in days.

They talk for a long time, maybe an hour. He has so many questions. She answers as many as she thinks she should. Eventually he either runs out of questions or gives up, she's not sure which.

So she looks at him now, just waiting. She decides to risk putting an arm around him, and to her relief, he sags into her, against her.

"It's too much," he finally says.

"What?" She leans away from her slightly to see his face. He's still not meeting her eyes.

"This. _This._ Everything," he says, starting to shake just a little. "It's too big. Knowing everything - what's going to happen - having to do it. It's too much. _I can't do this_."

She takes one of his hands in hers. "Jonah. Look. Look at me." He looks over at her, his pupils dilated. He's breathing too fast. "_Yes," _she tells him. "You can_._ You can do it. You already did. And you're gonna do great."

He closes his eyes. "OK," he says, like it's a prayer. "OK."

* * *

Juliet can't sleep that night, rolling over and over in the empty bed by herself. This is ridiculous. If it's all going to be like this for the next year, they might as well just move now, cut their losses and forget it. She didn't move here so she could sleep alone while her husband walks around the house like a ghost. What a stupid idea all of this was.

In the milk-blue light of the full moon, she pulls on yesterday's clothes, then goes and stands outside the office door. She listens to the clattering of the keys but she can't quite bring herself to knock. She checks on Eva, curled up in a nest of stuffed animals, listens for Jonah's even breathing on the other side of his bedroom door. Her footsteps are quiet on the creaky stairs.

She finds the rum in the cabinet over the refrigerator. Leaves the bottle behind, but not before taking a decent-sized swig. Takes her book out to the back porch.

But she's not out there for long before she hears footsteps in the hallway at the back of the house.

James is standing in the doorway, holding a stack of papers. Considering she's the paperwork queen around these parts, it seems a little uncharacteristic, but he looks better, happier, than he's looked in weeks. She tilts her head curiously.

"I been writin' somethin'," he finally says, and she feels like something has shifted for the better. She smiles, reaches out her hand to him. He steps forward and sits down on the bench next to her. Wraps his arms around her.

_Welcome back, _she thinks.

- END FLASHFORWARD -


	84. It Only Ends Twice

**A big thanks to eyeon for beta'ing the last part of this chapter! Two more chapters (I think) to go after this one.**

* * *

_"She never inquired, but she never recoiled, either. This is a quality that I look for in a person, not recoiling."_

- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

Juliet snaps awake in the black of their bedroom, rolling over, sitting up, gasping for air. There's nothing there, nothing at all, but why can't she breathe? She's panting and choking back sobs, she can't breathe she can't breathe she can't breathe and somewhere in the middle of it all, James wakes up and he's touching her shoulders and she's trying not to cry until it all comes, barking angry sobs from she doesn't even know what.

"Juliet - " James is trying. "Jules, it's - "

She shoots her arms out, shaking off his grasp and runs down their little creaky hallway, slamming the bathroom door behind her. She just barely makes it in time.

* * *

James can hear her retching from down the hall, and he runs a hand through his hair. These nightmares seem to be getting worse, even after all these months, ever since they'd gotten back from Miami after Alice had broken into Rachel's house. Maybe the scariest thing about it all is that Juliet says she still can't figure out what, exactly, they're about.

Problem is, that always gets him thinking about Jonah growing up and heading off to that island... and that pregnancy they already lost... and the one that they're hanging onto so far. She's seven and a half weeks now, a week past the end of her previous pregnancy, so that's something, anyway. He gets out of bed, goes down the hall.

The throwing up is a good sign and all - or rather, it would be if it can be construed as pregnancy-related and not horrifying-unspecific-nightmare related, anyway. But she'd almost puked this morning over the eggs he's been cooking, and that had mollified them in a gross-enough way. Although this is the first time she's managed to actually puke.

He's standing outside the bathroom door now. "Jules?"

"I'm all right, James." Her voice is hoarse.

"You want me to come in?"

"Not particularly." He hears her start gagging again, and he goes downstairs to fetch her saltines.

When he gets back upstairs, his eyes adjust to see Clementine in the hall, her arms crossed, eyes narrowed suspiciously.

"Why is Juliet barfing?" she asks suspiciously.

James shoves the saltines behind his back - just in case Clem remembered Cassidy eating them too during her pregnancies with Tabby and Lulu. Juliet had bought the saltines this past week when she'd started feeling queasy. "She's, uh, she ain't feelin' too good." _Oh, right. Great. Fuckin' perfect._ Somewhere in his past, he'd once made an entire career out of lying. Something tells him he's more than a little out of practice at this nowadays.

Clementine rolls her eyes. "Well, obviously."

"Can we talk about this later? It's the middle of the night."

"I need to pee," she whines.

"You got a report card full of A's, I know you have the mental capacity to understand there's another bathroom downstairs."

His daughter makes a face at him, clatters downstairs. He's guessing he should be expecting a call from Cassidy within the next week.

* * *

Juliet presses her face against the cool tiles of the floor.

She feels flushed and gross and too hot and her stomach hurts and her throat hurts and her head hurts and her heart hurts. The mood swings have been terrible lately, and she knows she has this pregnancy to thank for it, and yes, she's grateful for it too, but at the same time she can't help wondering if she's really experiencing pregnancy-related mood swings at all. The dreams have been running her ragged lately, waking her up too often and toying with her emotions.

James is knocking at the door, asking her if she wants saltines, tea.

"I just... I just want to stay here," she finally manages.

"You sure...? 'Cause I got the saltines out here, and I can just..." He trails off uncertainly.

"OK, tea," she mutters into the tiles. Just to get him away from the door so she can try to think about this some more. The dreams had started in what? February? No, maybe January. Maybe that day they'd had that driving lesson in the snow. She'd definitely had some kind of dream on the couch when they were napping after that. It hadn't made her desperately sad though, just confused, anxious. It felt as though the easier, happier her waking life got, the more upsetting her dreams became. And she couldn't even see or hear in those dreams, not really. She could only feel, and it was driving her crazy.

- FLASHBACK (1925) -

"OK, this might be... kind of intense." Joe kneeled down to look at his little self. "Hey, buddy, there's gonna be some really bright lights and loud noises. I want you to climb up on my back, and then we're all gonna run together. Can you hang on really tight?"

Jonah nodded. "Yes," he said very seriously.

"OK, then."

Jonah climbed onto his back; Juliet tried to figure out exactly how weird and paradoxical this actually was in the grand scheme of the universe. Her grown-up son stood and nodded at her and Richard before bringing the walkie to his mouth. "Sid, we're ready when you are, over."

" - K - it's coming - " Sid's voice crackled back at them.

"Give me your key," Joe said. Without taking her eyes from the wall of smoke in front of them, Juliet removed the long leather cord - blood-stained and knotted back together where it had been cut. She held it out to him wordlessly. In her peripheral vision she saw him clench his jaw as he placed it around his own neck, tucking the cord underneath his shirt.

"While we're all swapping belongings..." Richard began, and opened his bag, handed Juliet a gun.

"Gee, thanks," she said dryly, and slipped the gun into the back waistband of her pants.

A white whine started up around her head, like the beginning of a time flash - but then the sky changed to purple, clanged loud and long. The smoke hissed like a campfire being put out, and it rolled up over itself, poured away from them in all directions for a long moment before reuniting into one long, retreating black stream.

They took off over the ash line, not running _exactly_, but not wasting time. Every few minutes, the sky roiled purple again, keeping the smoke from returning to them. The four of them were still a few miles from the well when Joe slowed, nodded at her and Richard, and slipped Jonah back onto the ground. "This is where we split up," he said, and Juliet's stomach flipped. "I have to figure out what's going on over at the other camp. And I have to find Carolyn."

Juliet wanted to tell him she'd go with him, wanted to yell, _NO_, she wasn't leaving him, she wasn't letting him go off without her, but there was her little boy to think about, and she knew she couldn't do that. "All right."

"I'll be there as soon as I can, all right? I'll go back with you, to your present, and then I'll figure the rest of it then." He thunked his satchel onto the ground, pulled out a second walkie, held it out to her.

Juliet took it from him, but clasped his hand for a moment before he pulled her into a hug. "It's gonna be all right, I promise," he told her. "I'll be two hours behind you. Just get to the well."

"I love you," she managed, reaching up to stroke his forehead."You know that, right?"

"I love you, too. It'll be OK. Just go with Richard. I'll see you soon."

She forced herself to nod, and took her little boy's hand. And of _course,_ it was probably less than half an hour after that - the sky still periodically flashing purple - when a girl with long, gold-brown hair almost ran straight into them. "Bloody hell!" she burst out, and Juliet's heart skipped a beat until she realized it wasn't Alice, remembered who Alice really _was._

But the girl's eyes - no, the _woman's_ eyes, she was maybe about 30, just petite - widened in seeming recognition. "Juliet?" she gasped.

"Carolyn, we would presume," Richard put in, and Carolyn nodded.

Juliet realized she was looking at her adult son's ex-girlfriend (the one he was still so hung up over), right here in the Jungle of Insanity. _Great, why don't we just let this get a little MORE complicated_, but at the same time - thank the universe she was alive.

Carolyn began to speak, but then she looked at the boy holding Juliet's hand, and her mouth fell open a little.

"This is my son, Jonah," Juliet finally said, and Carolyn just started nodding."Yeah. Yeah, hi - hi, Jonah," she stammered, widening her eyes at Juliet and Richard in some approximation of, _you've gotta be freaking kidding me_.

Jonah narrowed his eyes suspiciously, stepped halfway behind Juliet.

"Well, nice to meet you, Carolyn," Juliet eventually said. _Well, THIS is awkward._

"Yeah, um, you too." Carolyn was smiling, embarrassed. She was wearing sturdy-looking hiking boots, dark green cargo pants, a tan tank top with a rifle slung over her left shoulder, outfitted perfectly for this little endeavor. Belatedly it occurred to Juliet that if she herself were dropped in the real world right now, she would have looked like a homeless person: jeans with holes in both knees, worn-out oxford shoes, her dirty curls half tied-up with a scrap of faded green cloth. Her shirt was an old dress she'd cut in half ages ago.

"Where's - where's Joe?" Carolyn finally asked.

"He went back to the travelers' camp to find the rest of you."

_"Goddammit!_ Only Sid and Fran are left and they're running the machine. I came to find him."

"But what about the rest of your team?"

"Maybe we should get this show on the road again," Richard suggested, shifting his weight to his opposite foot.

"Where are they?" Juliet asked again.

Carolyn exchanged a long look with Richard. "They're all either gone or dead," she finally said. "The - well, you know. The smoke. You have a walkie?"

"Yeah," Juliet sighed, handing it over, and they started moving again. Carolyn tried the walkie a couple of times, getting only static. Before they could get very far, though, a series of gunshots rang out. Juliet whipped around and fired off a couple shots of her own, saw a man on the ridge in the distance go down. Great, she just shot a man in front of her five-year-old - but Richard had already scooped him up, shielding him _(he didn't see, thank you thank you)_. "Come on!" he yelled, and they set off running, wedging themselves against the base of a banyan tree a few yards away.

"Bloody hell," Carolyn muttered, bringing her rifle front and center. They stayed there, perched and ready, for minutes that somehow felt like hours.

Meanwhile, Juliet couldn't stop looking at Carolyn. She had never laid eyes on Penelope Widmore, but she knew. She just knew. "You look like your great-grandmother," she finally said.

Carolyn gaped at her. "How did you... Does Joe know? That she was my...?"

"I don't think so. You can tell him later. When you both get off this island."

* * *

Richard covered the three of them when they finally left the tree's shelter. They were running outright now, no time to waste. Juliet carried Jonah on her back as long as she could, until her shoulder started to give out and she felt like the wound on her collarbone was going to reopen. Richard took over after that, and she couldn't figure out when their uneasy truce had given way into actual friendship. The sky kept flashing purple every few minutes; an electrical whine somehow buzzing inside Juliet's head, and she wondered if she was the only one who could hear it, then immediately dismissed the thought. Her head was pounding, though, anyway.

Carolyn tried the walkie again, right before another gunshot rushed by them, but Richard was down on the ground protecting Jonah, and Carolyn whipped out her rifle, fired off a successful shot at a distant figure.

"Nice," Juliet murmured in approval before she could stop herself.

Carolyn gave her a wry smile, and they took off running again. They were losing light, losing time (she was always always _always_ losing time) and they had to hide for nearly an hour when they heard people approaching, realizing they were Jacob's brother's people, and too many of them to successfully take out in a gunfight. Especially with a five-year-old right there. (What the fuck had she gotten them all into?)

Running. Again. Feet pounding through underbrush, a light rain starting up, and then Carolyn was falling. She threw the walkie at Juliet's feet before she vanished in time.

"This is not going well at all," Richard observed.

"You think?" Juliet retorted before bending to pick up the walkie. She tried it again. Only static.

* * *

The three of them spent the night in a shallow cave. Neither Juliet nor Richard was willing to leave the other one in charge; they sat at the mouth of the cave together. Jonah slept toward the back of the cave, using Juliet's satchel as a pillow.

"He was supposed to meet us at the well in two hours," Juliet said mournfully.

"I'm sure he'll be waiting when we get there," Richard replied. "We'll leave at first light."

"Do you think the machine is interfering with the walkies?"

"Anything is possible."

_The understatement of the century_, Juliet thought. She closed her eyes for one too-long moment. She was so tired. Of all of this. She was fucking exhausted.

* * *

The sky had stopped flashing purple by the time they left the cave. Her head was throbbing. The watery yellow light of dawn made her eyes burn.

The area around the well was deserted, a rope ladder coiled in the grass against the base of it. It wasn't even really a well anymore; Juliet could see just an inch or two of water at the bottom. She climbed down first, holding the ladder steady for Jonah. Richard arrived last.

A wooden door waited at the end of a low-ceilinged corridor. She opened it, oddly unafraid, just hoping that Joe was waiting for them in there. (He wasn't.) This room was freezing, the stone walls covered in sparkling frost.

"You have your canteens full?" Richard asked for probably the third time.

"Yes. I'm going to wait. We have to wait."

"What are you talking about?"

"Joe - we have to - "

"Juliet, their machine has stopped, in case you haven't noticed." Richard opened a small door, pulled out two fur-lined parkas with Dharma Initiative emblems on them. The jackets were frosty, too, but anything would an improvement. She zipped up Jonah's parka for him, then her own.

She knew they couldn't wait. They couldn't wait up there; the smoke would be coming eventually. They couldn't wait down here; they'd freeze. There was her grown son, who'd manged to somehow become her best friend over the past three weeks, her friend, her confidant, someone who knew her inside and out, knew her secrets and didn't care. And the little one, his lips nearly blue, his dirty hair sticking up. His small face was full of confusion and fear, his teeth chattering with cold.

Juliet stood again. "What do we have to do?" she asked Richard.

He led them into a larger room, a wooden wheel half-embedded in the stone wall. "There's a pencil mark on the wheel. Push it to that mark, and only that mark, and you should be fine. Put your son on your back; it's important that he doesn't touch it himself."

"Richard," Juliet said awkwardly. "Thank you."

He nodded, handed her a compass. "It should be two miles north-northwest to the nearest building. And I guess I'll see you in 2001."

She shoved the compass into her pocket. "And I hope I'll never see you again."

Richard just smiled.

* * *

Jonah looked like he was going to throw up in the taxi. "Close your eyes," she whispered to him.

The driver kept looking at them in the rearview mirror. She spoke no Arabic, but just enough French that they were able to get by. But she knew they were filthy and dressed strangely and her son had clearly never been in a car before, or maybe there was actually no way anyone would even assume that in this day and age, there was a little boy who'd never been in a car before.

The driver let them out at the curb; they had no luggage he needed to help them with. Juliet tightened her grip on Jonah's hand, and they stepped into Tunis-Carthage International Airport. She wasn't even sure of the date.

People were _everywhere,_ lining up, buying food, chattering on cell phones, pushing luggage carts. She couldn't get over the fact of how noisy it was; she could even somehow hear the undercurrent of the electricity.

"Where - where are we?" Jonah whispered.

She felt like maybe she wanted to throw up, too. Her voice was quieter than she'd meant it to be. "We're in the real world, buddy."

- END FLASHBACK -

Juliet and James are at the grocery store when James finally brings it up. "You don't think - you don't think those dreams you've been havin' are about Jonah on the island, do you?"

Juliet pauses, a carton of orange juice clutched in her hand. Finally she remembers what she was doing, puts it in the cart. "I did at first," she admits.

His heart skips a beat. "An' now?"

She turns to him, wraps her fingers around the edge of the cart. "I feel like maybe they're about my sister," she says in a low voice.

_No_, he thinks, his heart sinking. Not that that's worse than Jonah, but - _shit_.

"I don't know. But they really got bad after we came back from Miami. They're not about - they're not about Alice. They... it just feels like I felt when she had cancer." She closes her eyes, her face starting to crumple. Oh fuck, why did he bring this up here? The pregnancy-related mood swings are bad enough as it is without the rest of it, and he moves forward, closes his arms around her. She wraps her own around his back, holds on tight. James gamely ignores the strange looks they're getting from fellow shoppers. "I can't lose her again, James. I just can't."

"You ain't gonna."

"We don't know that."

"We don't know anythin'."

"I just want - I just want to know that it's all going to work out," she admits as they pull apart. "I feel like it's especially hard because I know little bits and pieces of the future, and I feel like that's tormenting me even more." She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. There's suddenly, somehow, a small smile. "But hey, at least we can talk about these things now, huh?"

"Sure as hell beats the days we had to communicate with those notes inside a book, huh?"

Her breath hitches. "What did you say?"

"Just said, it beats when we had to leave notes for each other in a book. You know, in the basement."

"Oh - my god."

"What?"

Juliet reaches out, grips his arm tightly. "The - the basement. The basement door - the writing on the d - James. We have to go. We have to go home Right. Now."

* * *

She pulls the cord on the overhead light so fiercely for a second she thinks she'll snap it right off. The chain flips up and twists over itself, clanking and clanking against the glass dome. She's already running to the shelves before their eyes adjust.

"What are we lookin' for, Jules?" James' voice is full of urgency, although he has no idea why, only knows looking at her frantic face that they should have done this a long time ago, if only the realization had come sooner.

"I don't know. I don't know. I don't think you can help me. I just need to - " She breaks off and starts searching the shelves frantically, book by book. She pulls out Slaughterhouse Five, flips through it, hurls it to the floor. Sweeps her arm across the next shelf, and a tidal wave of books clatters to the floor. Starts sifting through them. Flips through Timequake. Catch-22. Orlando. Watership Down. The Time Machine. Lord of the Flies. Certainly fucking _not_ Alice in Wonderland. (No.)

Then she remembers, and jumps up from the floor, flings herself to the other shelves across the room. She runs her fingers across the spines. "Here it is."

It's in her hands. Everything That Rises Must Converge.

She takes the letter from between pages 34 and 35.

_Dear Dr. Warrior -_

_First off, I'm sorry because I know you hate Flannery O'Connor. But you have to admit it got your attention, did it not?_

_Second, I'm on my way to Craphole Island right now. Sorry about that, but I'm hoping you're long since done with being angry over it. Unfortunately though, by now you already know that I was not, in fact, two hours right behind you._

_I'm sorry, because that's not the only lie I told you._

_My primary mission was never to shepherd the travelers to the island. It was to get you and me, the little me, off the island. That's what always happened. And we have to preserve the timeline, like I told you. _

_ Another lie was this: We do know how to solve the time problems on the island. It's just that you won't like the answer very much. But I think you know - I think you've known ever since that day we came up in the water - what the answer is._

_To get right down to it: The end of the time problems and the end of the war will turn out to be the same thing. Just the one, single, simple thing. There is no good or evil, not really, and I know you know that. But there is a way to end things, so that no one else will have to suffer because of that island. At least, not past this one last time._

_You'll know what you have to do, when everything's ready. I promise. I think Daniel Faraday explained this sort of thing to you before: It's all at the same time, just not the time on a clock. Once you know, do it immediately. I know you're worried about the loss of life, and trust me, I don't like it either, but it can't be helped. And it will prevent anyone else from ever getting their lives taken (or simply taken _over_) by the island. It will just be... over. _

_It only ends once, except that "once" happened already, to me. Just not to you._

_I don't want you to think you don't have a choice in this. You do. It's just... to me, you've already made it._

_For what it's worth, the way things stood in the place where I came from, you already knew I was going to be OK. We can just hope now nothing big changed too much. There are no guarantees, but it should be all right. That said, you let go once, because you had to. And you're going to have to do it again._

_Just remember, right now as you're reading this, I'm probably not that far from you at all. Go up and read me two chapters tonight._

_JMF_  
_010742, sort of._

_P.S., I'm the one who bought you the iPhone. Sorry that you hate it._

_P.P.S., Time travel's still a bitch._


	85. Mare Nostrum

**The latter half of this chapter I wrote way back in November... I can't believe it's finally time to publish it.  
**

**And OK, OK, two more chapters *after* this.**

* * *

_"I steeled myself against laughter; I would rather die than laugh. But I died, I did die."_

- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

James looks up from the pregnancy book. "It's got elbows as of last week."

From the opposite end of the couch, Juliet looks up from their worn-out copy of Slaughter-House Five, her feet propped up against his thighs. She arches an eyebrow. "Of everything that you could point out, you're fixating on_ elbows?"_

"It's just funny, is all."

She shrugs and looks back down at her book, but she's not really reading it anymore. "What if he left another letter somewhere?"

He sticks his finger in his book, marking his place. "I dunno, blondie," he sighs.

"I wish I knew what we were supposed to be doing." (She'd been reading that same line over and over,_ everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.)_

He leans toward her. "We're livin' our lives. That's all we can do right now."

She reaches out, pulls off his glasses. He kisses her on the nose and reaches for his glasses, but she holds them over her head. "Now what are you gonna do?" she asks tauntingly.

James plants a hand on her knee, leans further over her. She can feel his breath on her neck, and she likes it. They haven't had sex in more than a week - she hasn't been feeling too well lately, but she's feeling OK right now, and... well, hmm... So she leans back a little more, arching her back away from him, holding the glasses further away, and he comes up over her, but dammit, he's just smacked into her chest and she winces and drops the glasses over the back of the couch and they crack up. So much for being a seductress.

Except once they stop laughing, he pulls her up off the couch and leads her upstairs and they leave their books on the couch and his glasses on the floor.

In the middle of the night, James wakes out of a sound sleep, bolts back downstairs so Clementine won't see the pregnancy book on the couch in the morning. They're already terrible enough at keeping this secret.

* * *

They set themselves a deadline of the week after Thanksgiving to tell the kids; Juliet's already stuffed a stack of too-small clothes in the back of their closet. The roomier clothes of cold weather are on her side, and she wraps herself up in cardigans and buys bigger jeans and she's almost stopped feeling sick and James likes to kiss the bump that's slowly becoming the baby, and somehow she can't quite believe that it could be going so easily lately.

_(Except for the dreams but they just don't count. They just fucking don't.)_

The day after they hear the heartbeat, they have a Big Serious Discussion of whether they're going to move or add onto the house. It would be cheaper to move, but a lot more disruptive, and they like their neighborhood and need to stay close to Cassidy. James kind of wants to move and Juliet kind of doesn't, and the discussions go around and around, but mainly the whole thing is a gorgeous distraction from whatever else she doesn't want to be thinking about.

_(Everything's fine, everything's normal, happy normal family we can do this, we can.)_

They haul off to Miami for Thanksgiving; James is afraid to try to tackle a turkey again, and Juliet doesn't feel much like cooking. Not that she feels like taking a cross-country flight either, but better now than later. Clementine is spending the holiday with Cassidy, and Jonah doesn't know about the baby yet either, but Juliet's looking strangely forward to Rachel making a big fuss over her anyway.

At least until Rachel tries to be what she thinks is funny. But even snarky Rachel is better than no Rachel at all.

* * *

"You're going to end up huge," Rachel predicts as she sips her wine, observing her as they sprawl out over the couch the night before Thanksgiving. They'd taken Jonah and Julian to the beach in late afternoon, then gone out for dinner, and frankly Juliet's kind of exhausted. She's too old for this.

"Thanks, that's really kind of you to say."

Rachel arches an eyebrow. "Not my fault, I'm just speaking the truth, little sis."

She knows she's popped out a lot faster this time than with Jonah, and Cassidy's eyes have been hovering suspiciously over her midsection the past couple of switch-offs, but mainly the smell of Rachel's wine is driving Juliet crazy. "Do you know it's been like six months since I've even had a sip of wine?"

"Again, not my fault," Rachel teases her.

Juliet pats all around the couch, looking disappointed.

"What are you looking for?" Rachel asks.

"Julian's Supersoaker," she sighs.

"It's still in the backyard." James smirks at her from the doorway.

"And _you!"_ Rachel starts in, flinging her hand toward him. "Do you know my baby sister hasn't had so much as a _sip_ of wine in_ months?"_

"How quickly you change alliances," James says. "Meanwhile, I've come to haul her off to bed."

"What am I supposed to do, just lie around and gestate?" Juliet pretends to sulk, but the truth is that sleep sounds awfully appealing right now.

"Long flight this mornin', big day tomorrow, c'mon. Rachel, I'll help ya make the pies tonight."

"That I'd like to see," Rachel retorts. "Fine, bring her to go gestate upstairs... Juliet, that's really not an appropriate gesture for a mother-to-be."

* * *

Wrapped up in a nest of blankets in the guest room, she's still sort of listening to Rachel and Brian and James puttering around downstairs.

And somehow there's still sand on her feet even though she'd taken a shower after the beach, and her saltwater-damp towel is hanging up in the bathroom, but her heightened sense of smell is still going strong, and it smells like the ocean and here she is in this same room she keeps coming back to, again and again.

Juliet's in that phase between half-awake and half-asleep where she can't quite feel her body anymore.

But as she begins to dream, it's not a dream at all, but a memory, a memory of a memory, the memory of an impossible in-between time.

- FLASHBACK (July 1977 / December 2007 / August 2007 / November 1919 / eternity) -

When she woke up she was curled into a raindrop in the crevice of a palm leaf.

But the sun was drying her up so she edged forward and splattered into the sandy soil below. That didn't feel quite right, but it was enough for now, and when she woke again she could feel herself divided among the grains of sand, not at all something like a person.

But somehow there was a little bit more of her than before, and that was enough for now. She still felt impossibly small, the smallest small thing, and there was no body anymore, just a sense of self, that one time she'd been someone who had done things and known people, but now she was just crammed and divided up among grains of sand and she didn't have any feelings about that either way, because she was just something small and inconsequential and in pieces.

She liked being a raindrop better though, and she thought about that again and then she decided to be the sand at the edge of the beach, the tide lapping at her edges. She could stay awake for longer and longer now. She was the color of the sand, of the tide.

The ocean slowly acquired her and that was nice in its own way, nicer than being a raindrop and nicer than being slightly dampened sand particles. So she bobbed around and was particles of sand caught up in the ocean, and eventually she was being the ocean itself and she didn't need to worry about things like breathing or thinking or being carried out to sea.

_So you're here too, I take it._

_Who are you._

_Who are YOU._

_I'm being the ocean._

_I just got here. My name is Jacob, I think._

_That's nice that you have a name._

_You used to have a name, too._

_No, I don't think so._

_You put me here, you know._

_No I didn't. I'm just the ocean._

_You saved me from being nothing. I'm the ocean, too, but at least it's something._

_Is it._

_Oh, yes._

She liked how the currents carried her here and there, it wasn't like having a body at all. She could go in as many directions as she chose, and part of her was the undercurrent rolling back out to the world, and part of her would rush back to the sand, and she knew she could do this for a long long long time without ever wanting to do anything else.

But that other voice kept on trying to talk to her.

_You used to have a name, too, you know._

_No, I don't think so._

_You did. You just don't remember it._

_Can you help me remember it._

_I think you didn't want to remember things. So I don't think I can help you. Mainly I can only do one thing._

_What's that._

_You can feel it, you'll know when it's time. We can talk about it later, when you get to know yourself better again._

_Can you just leave me alone. I'm being the ocean._

_I'm sorry I can't help you._

_Don't be sorry. Just stop talking._

That other voice thought she had a name. That didn't make sense. How could she ever have had something like a name.

You had to be a person to have a name. She was just ... things. A raindrop sleeping on a leaf, the sand, the ocean. So she tried being a particle of dust on the back of a snail for awhile, it was quiet and slow but she didn't quite like being so small again. Smaller than the smallest small thing. And she missed having that voice to talk to after all.

_Hi._

_Hello. You came back. I'm glad._

_Are you._

_Yes. I didn't like being alone here._

_I didn't like being alone either._

_We can be the ocean together, you know. It's a big ocean._

_Oh. OK then._

_Plus, I think we need each other._

_Do we._

_Yes. You lost your sister. I lost my brother._

_What happened._

_Your sister is somewhere else, without you. And you're dead now._

She knew being dead was supposed to be something bad, at least wherever she'd come from, before.

Back when she was the opposite of dead.

People were always trying to prevent becoming dead. Or they were trying to prevent other people from becoming dead.

She thought about this a little bit more, and then remembered that sometimes she herself had prevented people from becoming dead. And then, a few other times, she made people become dead. And then if somebody became dead, and the dead someone was a person that other people cared about, those other people would cry and hug each other and act like it was a big deal, which it definitely was, back there.

But this didn't seem so bad. She had a friend, and she could be anything she wanted on the island. It was nice.

_I'm dead._

_Yes. But it's not so bad, is it._

_Not really. It's nice, being the ocean. What happened to your brother._

_We don't get along anymore. Sibling rivalry, you might say. And he sent someone to kill me._

_That's sad._

_Isn't it. But it's all right now. You can be my sister, and I'll be your brother, and we can be together forever._

The more she thought about it, the more she remembered there had been a sister, once, back wherever she'd come from. And the sister was important to her. She had missed the sister for a long time. So now she had someone who understood what that was like, to miss someone.

They moved with the undercurrents, they moved with the waves. Sometimes they brushed up against the shore, sometimes they were far away from the island. Sometimes they were down against the ocean floor, fish swimming through them. Once it was a shark with a strange emblem on its tail.

She liked to play with the fish. He swam in between the shark's teeth.

They moved through particles of sand, pieces of seaweed, the colors a rainbow of green. Sometimes she thought maybe she remembered the sister's face, or maybe she just remembered a flashing smile, a wrapped scarf. "Just bring her back in one piece," the sister had said.

Sometimes the light over them was pale, sometimes dark. Sometimes she left for a little while, to be the sand on the shore, or to curl up into a leaf for a nap, but she always came back. Because they needed each other, and he was so nice to her, and they both had someone again.

When she got bored Jacob would tell her everything about everything. About the island. About being dead. About his fights with his brother. How the brother had destroyed everything Jacob had worked for, sent all his people away, people named Jack and John and Kate and Hugo and Sayid and Sun and Jin and James.

But all that was nothing now, and instead he had a new plan, and this one would work, because they could do it together. Together she and he could end it, once they got their strength back; they could rise up and flood everything out and end all the time loops and the war in one go; end all the suffering and stop anyone else from having their lives ruined on the island.

_It would be simple,_ he said.

But dying was hard work, so for now they mostly rested. They were recovering.

_Do you know how glad I was to get here and see someone else was already here._

_No, how glad._

_So glad. It would be terrible to spend eternity here, all alone. Most people who die, eventually they pass on to the next world. And we can do that later, if you want. Once we finish here. And you understand. You had your sister, I had my brother. It's so hard to lose someone like that._

_I think maybe I do remember my sister. I remember her on a TV screen. And a man with an eyepatch. And hitting a glass of water out of someone's hand. Did she have blue sneakers._

_I don't know. Maybe._

_Did she like strawberry ice cream. I remember being sad but not being alone. And then being sad, and all alone. And scared she was going to die. Did she die._

_No, she's still alive, somewhere else. You're the one who died._

_That's kind of funny._

_Isn't it, though._

Sometimes he would sing to her, songs she didn't recognize. He wanted her to remember herself again so he said he was singing her songs she liked.

She wasn't sure he was telling the truth because they never sounded familiar. There was one about a shotgun shack. And one about wanting to be a hunter again; he explained that song was popular right before she got to the island.

And then there was one with neon lights and things getting better when you went somewhere else - in this case, downtown. Going somewhere else sounded nice, actually. Just for a little while.

_I think I'm going to go be sand for a little while. It'lll be like going downtown. Do you want to come with me._

_No, I like it here. I'll wait here if you promise you'll come back. You'll come back again, won't you._

_Yes, of course. I always come back. Don't worry. _

_I can't help it. We have to be together. _

_I'll be with you forever. We can't lose anyone else. Neither one of us._

_No. We really can't. Come back soon._

_I will._

She picked a rather nice particle of sand, perfectly globe-shaped, the color of pale late-afternoon sunlight. She shut what she imagined would be her eyes if she'd had anything like a body, if she wasn't the smallest small thing right now.

The sun sunned.

But then the biggest big dark cold hands wrenched her out of her perfect particle of sand and she didn't like that at all, she liked being whatever she wanted, and she liked being her new brother's new sister, but instead the coldest cold hands shoved her into a broken screaming human body that was nothing but white-hot searing pain, with fingers clamped around a shiny black rock.

- END FLASHBACK -

And she understands now. It's not the dreams that make her cry.

It's the waking up.


	86. Not the Time on a Clock

**Um... this ended up longer than I'd been planning. What's that mean? Extra chapters.**

**Also thanks to eyeon for correcting me on dates!  
**

_

* * *

"Was it alive and swimming, or had it died long ago, or was it dying now, right this second?"_

- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

_

* * *

"You mean it happens at the same time... Just not the time on a clock."_

- Leah Ford, Oxford, 2013

* * *

**December 8, 1925**

Joe opens his eyes and stares up at the overhead canopy of trees, behind that a fading sea of stars. It takes a moment before he realizes what he's seeing. It's close to dawn. Last he knew, it was late afternoon.

How long had he been unconscious?

_Shit_, he thinks. _Shit shit SHIT. _

Then, _wait_.

_What happened, happened... right? _Well, almost.

It's working.

* * *

**November 26, 2014**

Juliet seems to be sleeping when James slides into bed next to her, but before he can press up against her warmth, she rolls over and opens her eyes. "Hi," she murmurs. Smiles. Reaches up to touch his cheek.

"Hey yourself," he whispers back, sliding his arm around her waist. "You sleep at all?"

"A little, I think. What time is it?"

"'Bout 11."

Juliet doesn't respond, just keeps looking at him like she'd forgotten what he looks like or something. Finally she slips her hand from his cheek to cup his chin, and he takes the hint and kisses her. She responds fiercely, her hands wrapping into his hair.

After a moment Juliet pulls back from him a little bit, peels off her tank top without hesitation. It's been amazing him every damn day lately, the way her body's starting to change; it's more noticeable when she's naked, of course, and he finds it incredibly sexy that she's not shy about it at all.

He'd gotten into bed wearing nothing but boxers, not expecting anything, but _damn_, even in late November Miami's like an oven sometimes. Juliet slides a hand down along his stomach until he stops thinking entirely about stupid shit like the weather.

James pulls her underneath her and she's so warm and her hands are all over him and when he's finally inside her, it's just... The way she's biting down on her lip would be one thing, but then there's the way her fingers are digging into his arms and the way she's starting to tremble, but then so is he, and he wonders how it is that this woman can still drive him crazy like this after so many years (four in total, or maybe ten, or not even one and a half, but who's counting), and when he buries his face into her hair the rest of the world disappears.

Afterward she tucks herself against his side, holding him tight to her, pressing her forehead into his shoulder. "Now what was all that for?" he whispers, his tone teasing.

She shakes her head a little too long, reaches up with warm fingers to touch his face again, like she's lost, disoriented in the dark, trying to get her bearings, find an anchor. "Just missed you, that's all," she finally says.

* * *

**December 8, 1925**

Joe gets to his feet carefully. Oh, the irony. His mother - the mother from his present, not the younger, almost-feral version on the island - had warned him that if he wasn't careful, he would end up tripping over a tree root and spraining his ankle, getting delayed. She'd told him a different route to take.

So what happened? He decided to take the original route anyway - it was shorter - but stupid him, while he was running, he kept looking down at the ground so he wouldn't trip over any tree roots, and instead ran directly into a low-hanging tree branch, hitting his head, _hard_.

The universe has a way of course correcting. Or, it's supposed to, anyway. And it had. He isn't sure whether he should be glad or pissed off.

And tonight, somewhere else on the island, his mother and his five-year-old self are probably spending the night in a shallow cave with Richard Alpert. Joe remembers, still, sleeping with his head on his mother's satchel, while she and Alpert sat in silence at the entrance to the cave.

It's not safe to run through the jungle, not usually, but Sid's machine flashes the sky purple again, and Joe realizes that Sid must be staying up all night to run it. Or Fran or whoever's still there - what the hell had Sid said about someone being dead?

Carolyn. Caro, _here_, on the island. _Oh, shit. FUCK. _Everyone had agreed it was a dangerous idea - Faraday (her fucking uncle of all people), Joe himself, his mother. Even the rest of the science team. Of course Caro's parents were flipping out about even the idea of it, what with their we-must-stay-away-from-island-business-at-all-costs mentality.

Hell, Caro's brother and sister have respectable, normal lives and suitably British jobs. Charlie's a barrister, happily married, the father of two. Anna's a horse trainer, engaged to... another horse trainer, go figure. At least her fiancee is a woman. That should have thrown something different into Penny and Desmond's little world, but instead they'd happily accepted Bethany with open arms.

"Just don't worry about it so much," Caro had told Joe for the millionth time. "You know how much trouble Daddy had with my mum's father? And anyway, my parents like you, they_ do."_

"Sure they do," Joe had muttered.

"You know it's just that he's nervous about what you're supposed to do. And the way your mother and Uncle Danny are thick as thieves - well, that makes him nervous."

"What's the problem?" Joe had said defensively. "They work together."

"Oh, they do not." Caro had rolled her eyes at him. "Your mum's front company doesn't count."

And now. Now. Is he supposed to find his mother at the cave, tell her to go back to the real world, not to worry about him, he's fine? Or find Caro, get them both the hell out of here? He's frozen in place. His mother will spend months worrying if he doesn't get to her before she leaves the island.

But Caro - Caro on the island. Faraday had told them all that sending a descendant of Desmond Hume could be risky. No one knew what sort of unique qualities Desmond could have passed down to his children, and the rules of time travel - when they're properly working, anyway - might not apply to them.

Joe digs through his bag for a flashlight, then takes off running.

* * *

**November 26-27, 2014**

Juliet listens as James' breathing evens out and he drifts off to sleep. She's insanely tired at this point but her thoughts just keeps flying around in circles.

So all these months, ever since her last little "visit" to him... she'd been missing _Jacob? _There's a part of her that still doesn't want to believe it, but her heart pangs softly in protest when she tries to deny it to herself and she knows, she knows it's true. She remembers being dead and she remembers being loved by him and she remembers feeling safe, protected like nothing was ever going to hurt her again.

And the reason Juliet couldn't breathe when she'd wake up from those dreams - it was because she'd been dreaming she was in the ocean, and she didn't need to breathe there. Couldn't have even if she'd wanted to, being dead and all.

So she'd loved Jacob. It figures she would. She's never been the best judge of character, has she? And Jacob - Jacob isn't noble. Jacob could lie to her. Jacob _had_ lied to her. He doesn't want to drown the island to end the time problems, or prevent future suffering. He wants it do it to kill his brother. Juliet knows this is true, knows it's as true as anything.

But was what his brother did to her so bad? She'd been waking up crying because she was remembering the pain, the pain of going from numb perfection to residing in her body again, her body after the fall, after the bomb. Broken ribs shattered leg punctured lung blood blood blood everywhere.

(She remembers Alice joking about choosing the lesser of two evils. What does that even mean?)

And Juliet wouldn't even be here if it weren't for Jacob's brother. Jonah wouldn't exist. _Neither would this next one_, she remembers with a jolt, brushing her hand over the slight swell of her lower belly.

* * *

**December 8, 1925 / July 3, 2013**

It's just past dawn and Sid's machine cut out an hour ago and Joe is still running when the sky flashes white all around him, and he's forced to pause, panting. Something clangs like an angry trembling bell inside his brain. By the time his vision clears, he's standing... well, he's standing exactly where he was standing when the white flash started.

His mother has turned the wheel. And now, somewhere in Tunisia, she and some five-year-old version of himself are lying in dusty sand, opening their eyes and breathing in dry desert air.

Joe closes his eyes. His memories are exactly intact so far._ Thank you_, he tells the universe. The timeline must have held._ Thank you. Thank you._

But then - again - he remembers Carolyn, and the world stills.

After a second, Joe takes off running again, toward his camp, fiddling with his walkie. He makes contact with Sid pretty quickly. Sid's a little bit frantic about the busted machine but Joe cuts him off, asking about Caro.

"She took off yesterday to find you," Sid tells him, and Joe wants to kick the base of the nearest tree in frustration, but then again, that means she's alive - or was, last Sid knew - and that's all that matters.

"What's the date?" Sid asks suddenly. "You think it worked?"

"I think so. My memories didn't change."

"You think maybe you should_ check?"_ It's Fran's voice now. God, those two could be insufferable at times. They were mostly working for his mother, not Faraday - in fact, Fran and Sid were both pretty good friends with his parents, despite the age difference. He was fairly certain that there had been a little too much wine involved the night that his mother and Fran had cooked up this scheme where Fran and Sid would dress like they were from the 1970s in order to befriend his mother's younger self. ("Well, I already knew it would work," his mother had pointed out to Joe.)

"Jesus Christ, what is it with you people? I need to go find Caro!"

"Hey now, we've been up all night with the damn machine!" Fran snaps back at him over the walkie. "We'll find her, I promise, but we also wanna get the hell out of here alive, and we have one last mission! You have the key?"

"Yeah, I have the - "

"Then just meet us at the time station, OK?" Fran sounds irritated.

"What about - "

"She's supposed to meet us there, if she didn't find you before the wheel turned. Just get going already!"

* * *

**November 27, 2014**

Juliet awakens slowly, in stages, the morning light creeping through her tightly shut eyes. She opens her eyes and her stomach lurches._ It's still true._ She still remembers. Pushing the sheet off her shoulder, she looks over at James, still sleeping and looking something close to serene. She still wasn't used to seeing him with his hair short like this. He'd taken Jonah for a haircut a few weeks ago and ended up getting one too.

Finding out had been something of an ordeal, though. She'd been in the shower when they'd come home, and James had let himself into the bathroom. "Didn't wait for me?" he'd teased her, and over the water she could hear him kicking off his boots.

"Derek, is that you?" Juliet had called from the shower. "Hurry up, my husband will be home any minute."

"Real sweet," James observed as he slipped around the shower curtain and stepped into the stall behind her. Juliet was washing her hair, her eyes shut to avoid getting soap in them, and as she was rinsing, she felt him step up right behind her, started moving her hair away from her neck so he could plant kisses on it. He'd paused for just a second. "Jonah went straight over to Ryan's, case you're wonderin'."

She'd sighed happily, reaching a hand over her head to touch his face. But her hand landed on his hair, which felt like it belonged to a stranger, and she'd yelped. She swung around to face him and her other arm automatically flew up and smacked him in the jaw as she jumped away from him. Somewhere in the process, her eyes popped open, and she hissed in pain as she ended up with shampoo in them.

"OW - Juliet - it's me - " He'd reached out to steady her, but she'd twisted away to rinse her face. He rubbed at his sore jaw.

"I know it's you, James, but you still probably just took a year off my life!" she'd said as soon as she was able. "You could have _warned_ me!"

"What, you don't like it?" He leaned over her, sticking his head under the water, dropping his arms down around her hips.

"It's not that I don't like it, it's - " She turned around, put her hands on his upper arms, pushing him away so she could see him better. "It's just a little surprising, that's all. Were you planning on doing this when you guys went out today?"

He ran a hand self-consciously over the top of his head. His short hair maybe him look younger, somehow. She'd never seen him with short hair before, though. It wasn't bad, just... "Nah, it's just - when he was gettin' his haircut, the boy asked me how come I had my hair so long. An' I realized I didn't have no idea why no more. I think sometimes we hang onto things a little too long, is all."

She wiped the water out of her eyes. "Well, since when did you become such a wise old man?"

"Now, you pipe down or I'll leave ya to Derek."

Juliet had smirked. "Well, maybe _Derek_ still has long hair."

Now in the early-morning light she moves her eyes over his face, thanking her lucky stars, again, that whatever life she thinks she's living seems to be working out all right. She can hear Rachel already puttering around downstairs, and Jonah and Julian playing some sort of game over the noise of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade on TV, and she thinks she should probably get up and make sure Jonah washes his face and brushes his teeth (who's she kidding, Rachel probably already did that) and see what she can do to help Rachel, who will undoubtedly always be in charge of all holidays, no matter whose house they have them at.

She slips out of bed, takes a quick shower, decides not to bother with the blowdryer/hair-straightening ordeal today. James comes into the guest bathroom while she's brushing her teeth and trying to convince herself she really, really doesn't want to throw up. "Mornin'," he smirks at her like he always does the morning after she comes onto him. She just rolls her eyes at him.

Of course, once she opens the door to the hallway and the scent of the cooking turkey hits her, she doubles right back to the bathroom.

"Think you got another little vegetarian in there?" James asks her once she's done.

"Just shut up," she mutters.

* * *

**July 3, 2013**

Carolyn's standing outside the time station when Joe runs up to her, panting. Except the first words out of his mouth aren't exactly what he'd intended. "What the _hell_ are you doing on this island?" he demands.

She shoves the rifle back, crosses her arms. "Preserving the timeline?"

"What?"

Caro gives him what he can only describe as her _bitch, please _face. "When we first met in my uncle's office, was that _really_ the first time you'd met me?"

He pauses, remembering looking up at her from his child's height as he held onto his mother's hand. "Not... exactly."

Caro smiles triumphantly, awfully cocky for an _ex-_girlfriend. "So were you, like, lusting after me your entire life?"

"Hardly. That was back when I thought the adult me was actually my father, and you were just some usurping bitch."

"Your childhood was surprisingly warped."

"Thanks. So Fran and Sid are supposed to meet us here, they want to check the date and get on with their last mission, and then get the hell outta here."

"I know. Go down and check the date, I'll stand guard and wait for them."

He removes the key from his neck, the leather cord stained with his mother's blood. God, he hopes she's OK out there in the desert, even though though his memories haven't changed, so she has to be, at least so far. He clatters down the four flights of stairs. The next few months are going to be rough on them both. He himself had to get acclimated to, in no particular order, indoor plumbing, riding in cars, TV, light switches, air conditioning, shopping in stores, computers, video games, swimming pools, the concept of money, living in a normal house, owning more than one pair of shoes at a time, attending an actual school, playground rules and taking a school bus. Oh, and having a father and sister. It was a total snap.

The whole time he's making his mental list, he's fiddling with the computer in the station, and it spits out the answer he wants: July 3, 2013. The timeline is definitely holding, and he thinks enough shit's already gone wrong for them; this has to work, right? Or does even thinking that automatically mean something else unexpected will happen?

He comes back out of the station to find Fran and Sid standing there without Caro. They look grim.

"What?" Joe demands. "Where is she?"

"She disappeared," Fran finally says. "In time. Your mom... the one from 2042, I mean - she wanted us to give you this." She holds out an envelope.

His heart in his throat, he unfolds the piece of paper.

_Dear Dr. Genius -_

_Wish I had better news for you. Carolyn ran into us right after you left, but the walkie wasn't working. (Does the machine interfere with them? You should put this in the notes you leave me in December 2014 so I can preemptively warn you.)_

_You will also warn me that she disappeared outside the time station on July 3, 2013. As far as I now know, she got pulled into 2014 - November 27. I'm sure you know what that date was. I'm so sorry. Daniel and I have calculated it out - it'll happen about 1:08 p.m., island time. (It'll be November 28, after midnight, in the real world.) Carolyn arrives at 6 a.m., so you'll have about seven hours to get to her and get both of you out before it happens._

_Carolyn had left the walkie with me, so unless she had another one hidden on her somewhere, she's incommunicado, but she should be at the barracks._

_I hope you already got my instructions on Chang. And Sid and Fran should be ready to go pull out Alex and Karl._

_Be safe. Love you._  
_Ma  
010842 (really)_

_P.S., The iPhone was better than what I'm stuck with now._

_P.P.S., You better get back here soon or else you're going to be grounded until you're 42._


	87. Expiration Date

_"How can you promise that?"_

_"Because I'm watching you."_

- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

**November 27, 2014**

"You know, if I didn't know any better, I'd think you planned this," Rachel calls into the hallway.

"I can't help it," Juliet says. She's been assigned to table-setting duty. Rachel has the menfolk doing hard labor in the kitchen. There's no way in hell she can stand to be in the kitchen right now. Ugh, turkey. Disgusting gamey carcass of something that had actually been _alive_ once. Ugh, even thinking about it... ugh ugh ugh. She tries to think about pumpkin pie instead. Mmm, pie. OK, that's better.

Rachel comes around the corner, folds her arms, smirking. "A cold last year, morning sickness this year. That's little sisters for you, always mooching off the first-borns. Can't wait to see what little scheme you're going to come up with for next year."

Juliet thinks for a minute, then arches an eyebrow. Smiles triumphantly. "I'll be too busy nursing."

"And the year after?"

"Chasing after a toddler." Juliet shakes her head, trying to fake a Very Concerned Head-Shake. "They get into everything if you're not watching them, you know."

Rachel grins, trying not to laugh and almost succeeding. "I hate you."

Juliet plunks down the last of the forks and blows her sister a kiss. "Love you too, Rach."

* * *

**July 3, 2013 / November 27, 2014**

Joe comes out of the time station alone. _So this is it,_ he thinks. Just like that, today is November 27, 2014. The day the island ceases to exist. At least above the surface of the water.

(At least if the timeline holds.)

Somehow he feels it's fitting that he's here on this date, but then again, it's also scary as hell, and he's going to have to find Caro and then get the both of them the hell out of here before 1:08 p.m.

Out in the real world right now, it's Thanksgiving. His family, except for Clem, is in Miami. His parents have been married for only a year, and his mother is pregnant with a bass guitar-playing, love-em-and-leave-em zoologist. His cousin Julian is 13. In Oregon, his older sister is, too. He is seven, legally. Six and three-quarters, technically.

And yet somehow, in another way, it's been all of an _hour_ since he and his mother got off the island.

Joe is already sprinting for the barracks. He's getting a blister after all this running crap. If they ever do this again, he's going to remind himself to bring a helicopter.

* * *

**November 27, 2014**

James can't quite put his finger on it, but something is just... _off_ today with Juliet. She hadn't been feeling well earlier today, go figure, and yet she's acting far too cheerful. She's reaching out to touch him constantly today, more than she normally would, as if trying to reassure herself about something.

"Hey," he says, grabbing her wrist as she passes him in the hallway. She's holding a blue-and-white casserole dish that he vaguely recalls was one of Rachel's wedding gifts, courtesy of the afternoon that Rachel opened them all in the living room while Juliet kept a running list for thank-you notes. Meanwhile, he's got his sleeves rolled up and had finally escaped the hot kitchen, and they're almost ready to eat. "Everythin' all right today? You feelin' better?"

She nods without quite meeting his gaze. "Just busy. Trying to help Rachel. And staying away from the turkey."

"We got it all under control, don't worry."

The edges of her lips turn up for just a second.

"What's so funny?" he asks.

Juliet shakes her head, her slight smile replaced by something more cryptic. "I'm not sure yet."

Juliet keeps up whatever act she thinks she's pulling all through Thanksgiving dinner, Rachel getting all teary-eyed about Juliet's second Thanksgiving back home and Juliet smiling and yet... _not_ smiling, somehow, at the same time.

A low-grade panic is starting to coil inside James. What the hell is going on? Something's not right, but - but what? Juliet hasn't been anywhere, done anything without him around since they'd arrived in Miami yesterday morning. What's going on? What if something's wrong with the pregnancy? What if she's _really _not feeling well, but is afraid to say something?

She's eleven and a half weeks, it'll be twelve on Monday, they already heard the heartbeat, Juliet had even brought the ultrasound photos here to show Rachel in person although she'd already e-mailed them to her the day after they'd gotten them. She and Rachel are both convinced it's going to be a boy. She still has morning sickness, she's still extra-tired... everything is still OK, right? And he's just over-thinking this all?

She'd tell him if there was something wrong, right? They're communicating better these days... right?

He makes her put her feet up while the rest of them clean up, despite her protests that she's perfectly fine and he's being ridiculously overprotective. Why the _hell_ is he so uneasy today? Once she's on the couch with her legs propped up on the ottoman, she actually rolls her eyes at him. "I think I'm going to tell you I'm pregnant again next year if this is the treatment I get," she tells him.

"That's women for ya, all full of sneaky little tricks. Next thing you'll be tellin' me it ain't even mine."

Juliet arches an eyebrow. "Did I ever imply it _was_ yours? I'm sorry if you somehow got that impression."

He hands her a glass of water. "Drink."

Jonah's job is to gather up all the napkins and bring them to the laundry room, which takes, ohhh, about five minutes, and when he's done he sits on the floor next to Juliet. They're watching an old "I Love Lucy" episode, the one where Lucy's going to be in a Hollywood fashion show, but she's horribly sunburned. Jonah is giggling about how the announcer of the fashion show is tugging on Lucy's uncomfortable tweed suit, and on the screen, Lucille Ball is making horrible exaggerated faces she's trying to hide.

From the archway of the kitchen, James watches as Juliet smooths down Jonah's hair and plants a kiss on the top of his head, and it makes James' heart flip. Makes him wonder, again, about that somehow-distant and somehow-too-soon future they're so intent on not thinking about right now.

"She's OK, you know," Rachel murmurs to him. "Really. She is."

_Caught._ "I know," he replies.

If Thanksgiving is supposed to be all about giving thanks for what he already has, he's doing a pretty fucking awful job of it today. Because he keeps wishing for more.

* * *

Joe's footsteps still when he gets to the edge of the barracks. The sonic fence is long since dead, and he wonders exactly what made their people disperse from this place. Something about Charles Widmore, he thinks, and that freighter that Miles and Faraday were on, the first time around - but it's not really relevant to the matter at hand.

He's been back on the island as an adult for almost a year, and yet he'd never seen this place before.

And it unnerves him that in some other time, _anyone_ could be standing exactly where he is right now, in the shadow of a peeling-paint gazebo, back when the wood was shiny and evenly white. The dingy yellow houses remind him of those tiny square plastic Monopoly houses. He wonders which belonged to his parents.

He and Caro are probably going to be the last humans to ever cast their eyes on this place _(at least if the timeline holds),_ and that thought sends a shiver down his spine. He walks between the buildings on shaky legs, finds Caro leaning against a rust-riddled blue-and-white Volkswagen van. There's a faded _D.I. #7_ painted on the back door. It looks curiously like his mother's handwriting.

Caro straightens up when she sees him. They don't say anything for a moment. There's a streak of dirt on the side of her face, a rifle on her shoulder. She presses her lips together. His heart rolls over in his chest.

After everything they went through back in the real world, he would never have expected to see her here. Everyone had told her not to go to the island. Even his own mother, who _already fucking knew_ Caro would be going anyway.

In that instant before they say anything, he thinks back to a couple months before he'd left for the island. The night that things had finally splintered between them. They were cleaning up the kitchen after dinner. Everything had been fine all evening, more or less, until - "I don't want _you_ to go either, but I'm not forbidding_ you!" _she'd burst out, smacking the dish towel down onto the counter.

He'd stared at her in shock for just a second. Last thing they'd been talking about was what movie they wanted to see that weekend, for God's sake. "This has nothing to do with forbidding _anyone,"_ he'd finally said. "We don't know what kind of effect the island will have on a Hume. You _know_ this, Caro." God, just like that, he was so fucking irritated. He'd thought they'd finally been _done_ having this conversation. "We're going back to a time when events were still unstable._ Anything can happen!"_

"So I'm just supposed to sit back in the nice air-conditioned lab and pretend everyone else is on a bloody extended lunch break?" she'd yelled. "I can't - I can't _do_ this, Joe. You're going, and fine, that's what you have to do, but I'm _not_ waiting for you!"

"What do you mean, you're not waiting - "

"My parents waited for each other, and _your_ parents waited for each other, and it just fucked them all up royally!"

"What are you even fucking _talking_ about, everyone's fine, for Christ's sake!" He was still holding the dirty silverware.

She dropped the empty wine bottle into the recycling bin, clunked the lid closed. "Don't you tell me it wasn't hell for them, during. For _years."_

"But it all worked out. And it's not going to _be_ years for us."

"You don't _know_ that. You said it yourself, anything can happen. Amazing how we're all puppets on a string one moment, and then the next - " She'd covered her face, clearly angry that she was crying. "I just - I'm not our bloody parents, OK? I can't do it. I just need to pretend you never existed."

Joe felt like he'd been punched in the face. "It doesn't work like that," he said, but he'd left anyway.

Now she raises her face to him, the sunlight glinting off her hair in some cheesy romance movie way, Joe thinks, but she looks just the same and how is it that, until just a few hours ago, it had been a year since he'd last seen her?

"Well, fancy meeting you here," she says, thunking her rifle to the ground. Her tone is light, but her eyes are huge and - what is it? Sad? Not exactly. Scared? Relieved?

"What are you doing all the way out here?" He just barely keeps his voice from shaking.

"Gee, I dunno," she says a little sarcastically. A little shaky, herself. "What can I say? Real estate, it's a hobby of mine. You know." She waves her hand toward the decrepit houses. "There's big money in fixer-uppers."

He looks over at a house with a windchime lying crumpled on the floor of the porch, its chain broken. "Guess this isn't the time to get sentimental, huh?"

"Probably not. But the note was going to tell you to meet me here. So I kind of had to be here, don't you think?"

_Puppets on a string,_ he thinks. "How long has it been? Since you last saw me? Since I left?"

"About a week." Caro smiles, more of a half-smile, really. "Time travel? It's not _always_ a bitch."

He chokes out a nervous laugh. "Wanna go play Wheel of Fortune with a two-thousand-year-old wheel? Go home?" he says. "Have a beer that didn't come out of a dirty backpack?"

She bites her lip a little, smiling. "That's the best offer I've had all week."

They shuffle their belongings between them and get moving. Caro is walking a little bit closer to him than necessary, he can feel her body heat, and if she were anyone else he'd probably step away from her because, seriously, it's insanely fucking hot out here. But it's not just anyone. It's Caro.

Finally he can't help himself. "I thought you said you weren't waiting for me."

"I _didn't _wait for you. I came here."

He reaches for her hand as they reach the edge of the crater.

* * *

James and Juliet make it to bed early that night, the edge of her right foot touching the edge of his left. He's reading Lord of the Flies for the millionth time, and she's holding The Chosen more than she's actually reading it, but she makes sure to turn a page every now and then, anyway.

"James?" she finally says.

The way he closes his book so quickly tells her he's been waiting for this. "Yeah."

"We have to go to the beach. I have to go to the ocean."

"What's..." His face contorts, his brow furrowing like it used to all the time, back when he was still so afraid for her, all the time. _"Now?"_

She feels a sob swelling in the back of her throat that comes from nowhere, but she holds it back. "Maybe after Rachel and Brian go to bed?" She can still hear them talking down the hall. "I remember."

"You remember..." His fingers tighten around the edge of his book. "You remember what Jacob wanted you to do?"

"I remember being dead," she whispers, and his face goes white. "I was in the ocean. I _was_ the ocean. I was there first. Before Jacob. He... we looked after each other."

"Oh_... Jesus,"_ James mutters, inching closer to her. Taking both her hands in his. "Jesus Christ, Juliet." He's breathing too fast.

She tells him everything. Being the ocean. Being sand. Sleeping in a leaf. Jacob singing "Downtown" to her, inside her own mind. Telling someone about eternity, it turns out, takes awhile. "He misses his brother," she finally says.

He runs a hand over the top of his head. "Thought he wanted to kill his brother."

"That, too. He's not - he's not noble or anything. He's just as angry as any of us."

"When did you... when did you remember?"

"Last night. It's OK," she says, starting to tremble anyway. "It's OK." The same thing she'd told him as she'd dangled over oblivion, that long black drop that brought her to her death, to her next life. Alice in Wonderland with its cast of magical characters, its magic drink, its magic food, becoming bigger than the biggest thing, smaller than the smallest thing.

_"How's_ it OK?"

"Remember the note? The note he left me, in the book?"

"Jonah."

"Yeah." She hears Rachel's and Brian's voices fading, the door to their bedroom clicking shut.

"He said - he said you have a choice for what you do. You don't - you don't gotta do nothin' if you don't want to."

"Of course I have a choice. But I already made it."

_"How'd_ you already make it? You had one day to think about this."

"I already made it. To Jonah, from his perspective, coming from 2042 - I'd already made that choice. So if I don't do it, the timeline collapses. Everything changes. It _is_ the end to the island's time problems. That's the endpoint." _The end of the island._ Jacob isn't noble. Jacob is angry and petty and vengeful. He's just like humans, when they're pushed too far. Everyone is always pushed too far, at one time or another. If they're lucky, they're pushed too far at exactly the moment they can handle it. Jacob was pushed too far at exactly the wrong moment. But Juliet can use Jacob. Take Jacob's motives, and use them for what she needs. What they all need. What Jonah wanted her to do, told her she needed to do, what she _had_ done.

"So... You wanna do somethin' to save the island?"

"No," she says, pushing back the covers. "I'm going to destroy it."


	88. Come On

**This chapter goes out to cdgeiger: 1., for being awesome and 2., for leaving the 800th(!) review. Now the question is... Who will leave review #815?**

* * *

_"Yes, it is a fact between us, even if we never speak of it again."_

- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

- FLASHFORWARD (2030) -

The last time Alice ever saw Juliet, they were standing shaky in an ancient room under the remains of a just-as-ancient statue.

But Juliet, as it turns out, will see Alice twice more. Once, of course, is in Rachel's guest room: 2 a.m., January 31, 2014. Miami. Then, there's the other time. The last time.

Juliet will be about sixty. She can say _about_ sixty, because she hasn't known her exact age in almost twenty-five years. She will be in London. It will be late fall.

She will be standing under an electronic Departures board at Victoria Station. James will have disappeared in search of coffee. Juliet will be a little perturbed at how long it's taking. They have a train to catch, new recruits to see, and her shoulder will be aching just the tiniest bit thanks to the cold, not that she's likely to admit it.

She will be flipping through the messages on her mobile device. A flash of red will catch her eye. She will look up, and will see a woman, petite, pointy chin and bobbed hair, standing across the station, wearing a long red coat _oh my god look_.

The other woman has not aged, at least not the way she should have. This other woman will be thirty-five, maybe. This other woman will be looking at her, maybe.

In that first instant while Juliet is still trying to decide what to do, James will appear at her side. He will be holding two steaming cups of coffee, and she will instinctively turn to him. When she swivels back, all she will see is a narrow back, a flash of red, retreating from the crowd.

Juliet will decide not to follow.

- END FLASHFORWARD -

* * *

They don't turn on a light. She pulls on a bathing suit, yesterday's clothes. He finds his jeans on the floor, a clean shirt from his suitcase. They don't talk. He takes the towels off the rack in their bathroom. They go downstairs.

In the thin glow coming from a streetlight, Juliet scrawls a note, something about a late-night craving, leaves it on the kitchen counter in case Rachel wakes and worries. She knows the good-parent thing would be to knock on Rachel and Brian's bedroom door, warn them they're going out, so as not to freak out Jonah in case he wakes up and needs her. But the fact is, she's often bypassed the good-parent thing to do, and - after all - there's significant evidence that she will continue to do so.

James finds a flashlight in the front closet. She shakes her head when he reaches for the keys to their rental car. She wants to walk. She needs to.

The door clicks open softly when she pushes it. There is a first-quarter moon tonight. Not much light, but enough. Her entire body is starting to ache and she's not sure why. Not sure if she should be afraid. But she isn't.

They walk down the street. They walk to the end of the block. They walk to the edge of the neighborhood. They walk to the beach. They walk across the sand. They walk to the edge of a dock. She kicks off her sandals, peels off her clothes. James is holding the flashlight, even though he's never turned it on.

"Don't..." she begins. "Don't worry if I don't come up for awhile. I don't... I don't need to breathe down there."

James' chest is moving quickly, he's breathing fast, afraid, but he manages to nod. She's told him all this before. "Be - be careful, baby," he says, reaching for her. She closes her eyes as they wrap their arms around each other. She can feel his heart beating hard. And here she is, about to give orders to kill how many people? And he's just standing here on this dock at probably one in the morning, hugging her like none of this insanity bothers him at all. If this isn't love, she's not sure what is.

All the same, Juliet is more than a little afraid of letting James see this side of her. This side of her that somehow has been with her, in her, in one way or another, since she hit the bottom of that hole. Since she hit that bomb. Since she closed her eyes and died. Since she was in that water with Jacob, an eternity cut short. Since his brother staked his claim on her, turned her mark black. The mark of Jacob's people - black.

(She realizes if this works, her headaches will probably stop. Of all the stupid things to think of right now.)

The two of them are standing there, on the dock together, the wood of the dock rough and dry against the soles of her bare feet. They're there, together, and then they're not. She pushes him away, just a little, and her hand trails down his arm, touching his fingers for a second.

(If this doesn't work... what happens then? How's he supposed to know if she gets into trouble down there?)

She dives before she thinks about it anymore.

The shock of the cold makes her open her eyes. She knows she won't have to wait long.

_It's been awhile. I wasn't so sure anymore if you'd ever come back._

_I remember._

_You do. Really._

_I remember you. Us. The water. _

_I've missed you so much. _

_I've missed you too. I just didn't know it. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.  
_

_But you're not staying._

_No. But I'll help you get what you want._

_Is it what you want to do._

_I don't know. It's enough. But not if my son is still there._

_In what time._

_Don't be a wiseass. In this time. Now. Right now._

_He's just about to leave._

_Really._

_Yes._

_Can I trust you, Jacob._

_Yes. I promise you._

_Because we can't do this if - _

_I know. I wouldn't take him away from you. But you're sure you don't want to stay._

_I'm sure. I don't belong with you. I belong here. In this world._

_I miss you so much._

_I miss you too._

_Will you come visit me, after._

_I don't think that would be a good idea._

_It's so hard without you._

_But I remember you now. That has to count for something. And you'll have your brother back. I have my sister, you'll have your brother. It will be exactly like it's always supposed to have been._

_Nothing that happened, happened anymore._

_The rules changed, Jacob._

_Of course they did, Juliet. Time changed._

_Of course it did. But Jacob, now it will all be set. Set in stone._

_Set in water._

_It's an ending._

_And a beginning._

_He's really leaving._

_Just about. He's turning the wheel._

_How am I supposed to trust you._

_It's me. You can trust me. And really, I could pull you out of your body, drown you right now. If I wanted to. And we would be together forever._

_I love you, but you can be an asshole sometimes, you know._

_So can you. _

_So why don't you. Drown me._

_I don't know. I guess because you wouldn't like it._

_I sure as hell wouldn't._

_So then I won't. Are you getting cold._

_A little._

_Your husband is getting a bit worried up there on the dock. You know he was supposed to be one of my people, not you._

_I told him it might be awhile._

_It must look strange. That you don't need to breathe down here._

_I feel like a freak sometimes. It's not right, the way things are._

_The way things are is the way they are. It's not what they were meant to be, but it's the way they worked out._

_What's happening now. With my son. Is that why I remembered now. Because he's leaving._

_I think so. And Eloise Hawking died last night._

_Really._

_Yes._

_Daniel told me she was sick._

_She was. Now she's gone. Now she's everywhere._

_You're everywhere._

_I'm everywhere water is. So are you, right now. He's gone now, your son. He turned the wheel, with that Hume woman. They're gone. And we're everywhere. We're here. We're at the island._

_So we can do it now._

_Do you feel it. How you can._

_I think so._

_Focus._

She closes her eyes. Pushes out, with her mind. Trying to be the water, not just in her body but everywhere. Nothing happens for a long time. It's not working. She's trying, or anyway, she thinks she's trying... right? What is it she's supposed to do, exactly? This is ridiculously stupid. She opens her eyes.

_It's not working. Can't you just do it without me. I don't understand what you need me for, anyway._

_I can't do it without you. You were the water before I was. Just an instant before, but also an eternity before. You know how time is. And how it isn't. I don't have the strength without you here. You don't want it enough._

_Want what enough._

_You don't want to drown the island enough._

_I just. I just want this to be over. And it's never really going to be over, no matter what. Not for almost thirty more years.  
_

_And how do you think it's going be over, otherwise._

_I don't know._

_What do you really want._

_I want my son back. I want him safe._

_He's not yours. He's his own person. What do you want._

_I want there to just be a good side and a bad side._

_There isn't. It doesn't work that way. What do you want._

_I don't know._

_What do you want._

_I don't want anything._

_Yes you do. What do you want._

_I don't want __anything good that's already happened to change. _

_Then keep it from changing. What do you want._

_I don't want anyone else to die. I've killed too many people._

_Some people are going to have to. You know that. And this is a war. We do this, and we win, and we're happy. __And it's over. What do you want._

_No it's not. It's not going to be over, not really. My son is going to have to grow up and go there. There are still going to be things. Things I have to do, for this whole situation. Even if the island drowns tonight, it will always be there in the past._

_What do you want._

_I want time to be set. Come on._

_What do you want._

_I want to win. Come on._

_What do you want._

_I want to get out of the water and go home and get into bed and be warm and go to sleep. Come on. I want to live with James and raise my kids and see my sister. I want my own name back. Come on. I want to drop out of physics. I want my old job back. Come on. I want to go back to Oregon and grow things in my garden. Come on. I want Richard to die, finally, like he wants. Come on. I want to not hurt so much all the time. Come on. I want to pretend Alice never happened. Come on. I want to pretend Nicholas is alive out there somewhere. Come on. I want. I want. Come on. I want. Come on. Come on. I want. Come on. I want. I want this to be over. I want to win. Come on. Come on, Jacob. COME ON YOU SONUVABITCH._

She feels the water go out from her, then. It's on the island and it's in Miami and it's in her head but it's real, it's all real.

The water spreads out over the island, running in rivulets, then gushing in waves. The water swells up, catches the smoke. The two mingle for a moment and then they are only one. One entity, inseparable from now on. For eternity, whatever that does and doesn't mean. The ruined houses drown. The temple. People. The base of the statue. Palm trees, banyan trees. More people. Dharma stations. Garbage with white labels, black lettering, printed-on octagons. Crumpled-up left-behind tents on the beach.

Jacob's voice is still there, but it's mostly talking to someone else now, not her, and she can't breathe down here anymore and something tugs at her a little, a gentle tug at her ankles, somewhere down there, something imploring her to _stay, stay_ but just a tiny pull, a weak invitation that makes it clear that Jacob and his brother don't expect her to stay.

Juliet doesn't belong there, anyway.

She breaks the surface, the water streaming down her face, in her eyes. She wipes at her face, takes gulps of cool night air. The blood is pouring from her nose and she paddles weakly over to the dock and James is at the ladder and in the water and he's pulling her toward him, holding her, they're both in the water, his flashlight up on the dock rolling rhythmically in half-moon circles, the circle of light rolling back and forth at an unimportant spot on the water.

_There's no island after tonight,_ she thinks. She means to say it to James, but her lips don't quite move.

It's almost too dark to see his face, but his teeth are chattering in the cold and belatedly she realizes hers are too, and oh, there's a baby somewhere to worry about, and they climb up the ladder and he's wrapping a towel around her, hugging her tight to him, and she realizes she's crying, crying _hard_, almost crying too hard to hard to breathe, why hadn't she realized that before, and she's dizzy, the dock feels like it's rocking under her feet, almost, and there's really a lot of blood coming from her nose, and she sways, and oh, he's holding her tighter.

James is shaking somehow, maybe he's shaking with cold or fear, but she can't quite focus on him and her body hurts, it hurts so much everywhere she's ever hurt it before and she's so cold and she's not a person, not really, she's just, it's just, she, her skin is tingling and she's not really real, is she?

"We gotta get you warmed up," he's saying, and she hears his voice like she's still underwater, it's distant, and he's still talking to her, telling her to focus, focus on his voice, and he's trying to keep her conscious, she thinks, but her voice still isn't working right and James keeps talking to her and oh, he's afraid.

James peels off her bathing suit right there on the dock and she's still just looking at the water and looking and looking at the water, and he's pulling her shirt down over her head and onto her body and he's rubbing at her hair with the towel, and she manages to put on the rest of her clothes and they're warm and relatively dry and the blood from her nose is slowing now and she blinks and rubs at her mouth and nose, and somehow his face comes back into focus and she blinks a few more times and she sees the moon over the water, and the water is just water again and she's not the water, she's just a woman standing on a dock in Florida in the real world and she's a person, not at all something like the water.

* * *

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	89. No Sense of Metaphor

**This goes out to im_so_lost for leaving review #815 (yay!) and MadSteph for all her LJ encouragement. Also, I'm excited to announce that this story has received more than 10,000 pageviews in the month of June. :)**

* * *

_"We sat in silence, sipping our tea. And to think that twelve years ago, I had been one of those things."_

- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

She doesn't exactly warn him the instant before she dives, and when James sees her disappear beneath the water, it takes all his goddamn willpower to not go after her. What the fuck are they supposed to do if she gets into trouble down there? He'd turn on his flashlight but almost immediately a globe of light illuminates the water and he realizes he has no fucking clue what they're dealing with here.

Nonetheless, he stands at the ready, heart in his throat, hands almost shaking. He can't see her face, just her hair swishing around her head, and how cold is this water, anyway? She just... She doesn't have to breathe down there and none of this makes any sense.

He tells himself this is what always happened, she's supposed to still be alive in the future and it's all going to be OK, but those things feel less and less true as the minutes tick by. He can still see her moving down there and that's the only thing that keeps him from going in after her.

Anyone else would have drowned by now.

He's at the edge of the dock when the light in the water goes out, and he switches on the flashlight as she breaks the surface, gulping air, water streaming down her face. "Juliet - " he gasps in relief.

But she's got a bad nosebleed already, and her eyes are wide, her pupils dilated even in the dark. James drops the flashlight on the dock, and once he's in the cold water himself, he realizes he doesn't even remember how he got there. He pulls her close to him, trying to wrap himself around her, and she's shaking violently, crying hard. "What happened?" he whispers to her, and "It's OK. It's OK." And a whole lot of other things, but it's like none of it's even registering with her.

It's not that Juliet isn't talking, exactly, more that she's mumbling things in Latin and she's not quite blinking. He gets them both onto the dock, and she's basically just following his lead, not really thinking on her own yet. He's trying to warm her up, rubbing at her arms, hugging her, and God, what about the baby? And her nosebleed seems like it's getting worse, the blood running down her chin (and he's thinking of Charlotte in the jungle) and she's not even really looking at him. She's not focusing on anything, really, just staring off dazed into the distance.

Why the fuck hadn't he just insisted on driving? If they'd had a car he'd be taking her to the hospital by now, or at least to Rachel's so he could put her into a hot bath.

Instead he wraps a towel around her, still hugging her tight to him, and suddenly she's clinging to him, her fingers digging into his back. Her knees buckle but he's holding her so tightly that she doesn't have far to fall. "I got you," he tells her. "I got you, it's OK, it's OK." She curls into him, and he can tell by the tension in her body that she's in pain. "We gotta get you warmed up," he says, praying that's all it is. His heart's pounding anyway.

James peels off her bathing suit right there on the dock and she's still crying a little somehow, and he gets her shirt on her, and that seems to wake her up, at least enough for her to stand on her own. She stumbles and blinks, reaches for her pants and pulls them on. He finds her cardigan crumpled up on the dock and lays a hand on her arm. She looks startled for a moment. "Here," he says, and she slides it on, getting blood all over the right sleeve but it doesn't matter. The nosebleed is slowing. She blinks, rubs at her nose, her mouth. She blinks some more and then it's like she finally sees him standing there in front of her.

"James?"

* * *

When they get back to Oregon, Juliet starts making decisions. On the first Tuesday night after they're back, she's at the kitchen table sorting through the papers Brian had given her this time last year. She has James next to her, going through a stack of travel receipts.

There's a new folder on the kitchen table between them: evidence of Liemstal's actions in the past year. Courtesy of Brian W. O'Connell, attorney-at-law, overzealous brother-in-law, and employer of an assistant with too much time on her hands.

The time span Mittelos was active was relatively short, 1999 through 2003. But Liemstal has spanned decades, thanks to the magic of time travel. Alice wasn't very involved in Mittelos, but her name is all over Liemstal's stuff. And Liemstal, of course, is still going strong, despite the fact that its current Chief Operating Officer has technically been dead since 1942.

Brian had actually found enough documentation to prove that Alice had been in Miami on the company's dime in January 2014, around the time she'd broken into Rachel and Brian's house. Circumstantial evidence, sure, but hey, it's something for the police to salivate all over, right?

She looks over at James. "Poor Richard. Alice basically hijacked Liemstal." What an insane thing to say.

James obviously thinks so, too._ "Poor_ Richard? The guy practically kidnapped you, you realize."

Juliet shakes her head. "He had to." And Richard is dead now, anyway, she thinks. Just like he wanted.

James taps his pen on the pad of paper in front of him. "Somethin' tells me this whole Stockholm Syndrome thing will be pretty easy to prove in court."

"Shut up."

One of her first decisions: She wants to get her identity back. Weird thing is, she'll end up a Burke again, at least for the time being. And weirder thing is, they're not going to have to make up a whole lot. What's on the surface is pretty damned accurate. She was offered a job from Mittelos Bioscience in 2001, was drugged and taken to a remote location somewhere in the South Pacific. When they got tired of her, they put her on a flight back to Miami with her son, fake IDs and a warning that if she ever went to the authorities, they'd kill them both.

She's still going to have to figure out what to say they did all those years in that remote location, though. (She won't make up anything _too_ horrific. Nothing too great, either, though. Enough so that the authorities will have nothing but the utmost sympathy. Brian doubts she'll face any criminal charges, considering.)

And the break-in in Miami? A warning from Liemstal, the company that Mittelos had started funneling its funds into, after news of Juliet's disappearance had gone national. Juliet was simply afraid and had gone along with their demands until her family recently convinced her to go to the authorities and reclaim her identity. Couldn't be simpler... right?

Juliet's going to get a lawyer in Portland before they go to the authorities. Sometime after the holidays, though. But it's hard for her to think that the "story" is mostly true. It doesn't feel even remotely true, not when she was far too tangled up in it all. Her future's all tangled up in it, too. Her son's future. God, she hopes he's OK out there. He has to be.

And she's nervous about it all, there's likely to be intense scrutiny from the police, there could even be media attention and... really? Just like that, the danger is supposed to be gone? But if things are set, if they really can't change, and she's already done what Jacob wanted, no one else will come after her, right?

It's not that someone couldn't come after her for revenge, but it won't change the outcome of the war. And it won't be Alice, that much Juliet knows now. Alice could have killed Juliet in her sleep in January. Instead she'd waited for her to wake up.

And Alice had saved her life. That night in the temple. The night she'd gotten her scar.

_"Why'd you shoot Ben?" Juliet couldn't help but ask._

_"If you don't know, then I feel sorry for you."_

Juliet understands now, as much as she wished she didn't.

_Alice wipes slowly at the her blood on her face. "I loved you like a sister, you know," she says before she goes. "Guess that doesn't matter anymore."_

Maybe it matters and maybe it doesn't. And Juliet's still not sure. Time travel's a bitch, but so is sibling rivalry, after all. Alice still loved Juliet, even though Alice tried to destroy her. How can someone love someone, and want to destroy them at the same time?

Except isn't that what Juliet has done, too? There's a deep-down piece of her that knows she'd wanted to win the war because it meant beating Alice. James calls Juliet's feelings toward Alice "unresolved." Juliet tells him he's a librarian, not a therapist.

Another decision: She's never going to tell Jonah about Alice. Because eventually he'll grow up and go back to that island. And if he tells the Juliet there about Alice, that Juliet will walk straight up to Alice and put a bullet in her brain. _And that would be bad for the timeline_, she tells herself. What she doesn't tell herself: _I couldn't live with killing Alice._

Most of what's happened with Liemstal is a result of Alice's extended time travel. To Juliet and Richard's perspective, it was all between 1924 and 1925. Of course, Alice had come back about eight or nine years older. And she was cut off from everything once they'd learned the truth about her in 1925, but her actions spanned years. Decades. Centuries, even. Or, at least two of them, anyway.

Juliet sighs, looking down at Liemstal's operating budget for 1986 with Alice's looping signature at the bottom, Alice E. Perrin. So that was before she was married. Alice had married somewhere around 1930 - in Alice's time, anyway. Somehow they're going to sort this all out. She has to know. But she's going to have to make some diagrams, she thinks. All this crap is just too interwoven.

James looks over her shoulder, wincing. "Please tell me her middle name ain't Eva."

"No. It's - it was Eleanor."

"Just checkin'."

She flips through the next stack. The Liemstal logo is ugly, she thinks. "These people had no sense of metaphor. If I ever have a front company with an anagram as the title, you can bet I'll do a better job of naming it."

"Duly noted."

Another decision: She's going to start studying for renewal of her board certification, once the rest of this is all over with. It could be almost a year, though. And she won't try to find a job for awhile, anyway. She wants to stay with the baby for awhile.

It's not until the next night she finds tax forms for the donations Liemstal made to a scholarship program at Florida State University in the late '80s and early '90s. It's_ Richard's_ signature all over those forms. She throws those papers into the back of the desk. Maybe sometimes it's just better not to know.

* * *

"OK," she says. "Go."

"Jeremy."

She wrinkles up her nose almost immediately. "Jeremy is a bully name. And I thought we'd agreed about the J thing. It's getting a little precious, don't you think?"

He stretches out on the couch as much as he can without disturbing the laptop on his knees. "Fine, you go."

"Gabriel."

"Gabriel? Gabriel is like the kid who gets beaten up by a kid named Jeremy. 'Sides, 'Gabe' as a nickname?"

She pauses for a moment, considering. "You're right, Gabe is bad."

"It's all 'Welcome Back, Kotter,' you know?"

"Yeah."

"Uh..." He clicks a couple times on the laptop resting across his legs, looking at Nymbler, one of those baby-name generator websites. They probably shouldn't even be bothering with this until they know the baby's sex. But the naming stuff - this is one of the fun parts. "Eli?"

"Oh, just give me that." She wrenches the laptop away from him and looks over the page. "Caleb."

"Aren't there like four kids in Jonah's class named that?"

"Oh, yeah, I forgot. And that's why you vetoed Emily."

"I like Emily, it's just - she'd always get stuck bein' 'Emily F.' on everythin'."

"I know, I know." She scans down the list, clicks the shuffle button on the website again. "Lucas?"

"Nope."

"Oh, come on, what's wrong with Lucas?"

He leans over her. "It'll just always make me think of George Lucas."

"And I'm sure that would make you so upset, fanboy," she scoffs, poking him in the ribs.

"Like 'Star Wars' is so much more pedestrian than Stephen King." He clicks shuffle a couple more times. "Andrew."

She considers this. "Andrew has possibilities. Write that one down."

He leans over to the notepad on the coffee table, scribbles it down. "So you really think it's gonna be a boy?"

"Yes, but I was convinced Jonah would be a girl. So it's possible I'm just the least self-aware pregnant person ever. You know..." How is she even supposed to bring this up? They're leaning toward Eva for a girl, mainly since it was what she'd decided on last time, but... "If - if it's a girl, and you want to call her Mary, that would OK with me."

He rests a hand on her middle. "No more lookin' back."

She lays her hand over his. "OK." She says it like it's a promise. She says it like there isn't an entire stack of Looking Back on the kitchen table right now.


	90. She Taught Me Everything

_"The boy raised his eyebrows a little, and I saw that I was saved."_

- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

They're going through real estate listings on Saturday morning when Juliet starts to laugh. "How are we getting another mortgage?"

"Huh?"

"I'll probably be changing identities in the same timeframe as we're trying to buy a house. And this might not be the most charitable time to bring this up, but I'm not sure if we're legally married."

James takes a sip of coffee, makes her wait. He swallows slowly. "Weren't you the one who sat very seriously on a couch in the ER tellin' me it's is just a piece of paper?"

Juliet's lips curl up. "So's a mortgage. But we still need one unless you finally agree with me about adding on."

She's usually the more financially sensible of the two of them, but no way in hell is a two-story addition into the side of a hill gonna be cheaper than moving. He's secretly convinced she just doesn't want to have to pack up an entire house. But he wants to talk about the other thing. "You talk to Brian 'bout the marriage issue?"

"Well, he thinks we might have to get married again, when it's all over and done with."

"You're marryin' Brian now? I mean, not that I'd be opposed to tryin' somethin' new in bed, but that ain't what I was thinkin' of."

Juliet rolls her eyes at him, but she's smiling. "You ever think about it?"

"A threeway with Brian?"

"No." She crosses her arms, trying not to laugh.

"The mortgage?"

"No."

He decides to cut her some slack. "Ohhh... I think I see what you're gettin' at here."

"Well, I've already gotten married twice. What's that expression, third time's the charm?" She raises an eyebrow.

Not_ that_ much slack. "I dunno, Jules, you've been an awful lot of trouble. You really proposin'?" Annnnd, commence the death glare. Who's he kidding, he'd marry her six times over if it came down to it. He takes off his glasses, leans across the table. Kisses her before she gets any crazy ideas about looking for a taser. "OK," he says. "Yes."

* * *

James comes home Monday night to find Juliet dumping brown sugar into a mixing bowl. There's a clear plastic container of blueberries on the counter next to a cluster of other ingredients.

"Hey, you," she says over her shoulder, and he moves closer, wrapping his arms around her waist from behind. Why is she doing this now? They're supposed to be going on an actual date; they have a sitter showing up for Jonah in an hour. Clementine had refused to be babysat, and there's no way they're leaving her in charge, at least not yet. She's headed over to Emma's tonight.

"Hey yourself," he answers. "Thought we were goin' out."

"We are." Juliet lick a bit of batter off her index finger. "These will be out of the oven in half an hour."

James keeps watching her because she has her Sneaky Other Face on. What's so sneaky about blueberry muffins...? Wait a second. "These are Clem's favorite."

She doesn't miss a beat. "Trader Joe's had a special on blueberries today. And I figured that her team will need a snack after practice tomorrow. A few of the girls are coming over."

"That so?"

Juliet nods, all big blue eyes and innocence, and turns back to the matter at hand, washing blueberries. But he sees the sly smile curl around Juliet's lips. They'd let their deadline slip for telling the kids, almost two weeks ago, and the evidence is getting pretty damn hard to conceal.

"An' the fact that these are Clem's favorite kinda muffins don't have anything to do with wantin' to butter her up for somethin' we gotta tell her." James watches the smile grow.

"I found a good recipe for a cinnamon-crumble topping." She gives up on trying to hide the smile.

* * *

The next evening after the last of Clementine's teammates have dispersed, Juliet can't stop finding things to do. She cleans the downstairs bathroom and then answers a couple of emails from her eBay buyers - she's slowly been selling off some of her garage tools, and her spare parts business is still going well.

Then she notices the dust that's accumulated along the tops of the cabinet doors and drags a chair over to the counter, grabs a damp towel. She's up on the chair when she hears James come into the kitchen and pause, watching her.

"Wish you wouldn't do that."

"They're dusty."

"You could fall."

"I won't."

"You're just killin' time."

She pauses, still looking at the cabinets. Her fingers curl in acquiescence around the dishtowel; she turns and looks down at James. "So what if I am?"

"C'mon, let's go tell 'em I knocked you up."

"You're really charming, you know that?"

"You love it." He reaches out, helps her down.

* * *

They find Jonah and Clementine on the beat-up couch in the basement, playing Super Mario Galaxy 4. Clementine slides her eyes over to them warily when they approach. "I don't have that much homework tonight," she says quickly.

"Me either," Jonah quickly puts in.

Juliet sinks into the armchair. James wedges himself on the edge of the couch next to Jonah. "Ain't that," James says.

"O-kayyy?" Clementine sends Mario hurtling through space via one of those star wormhole things.

James notices Juliet glance over at him, her mouth tense and her eyes wide. He's seen her shoot a man straight through the heart at a hundred feet. But right now she looks like she's a 16-year-old girl about to tell her parents she's up the duff by a high school dropout.

"So, uh... You guys think you could pause the game for a couple of minutes?"

Clementine raises her eyebrows, her tongue sticking out of her mouth slightly as she defeats one of those acorn enemies onscreen. Jonah whines a little, about it almost being his turn, but Clem finally hits pause. "OK?" she says nervously.

Jonah looks over at his sister curiously, tilting his head.

"We, ah, we... have some news," James says awkwardly, jiggling his right foot just a little. Clem raises an eyebrow. Juliet is extremely still over on the arm chair, leaning forward slightly, her knees against the edge of the ottoman. She's not moving an inch. Guess this is up to him. "We're havin' a baby."

Clementine exhales and sits back against the couch, shaking her head. "I _so_ called it."

"Uh... what?" No yelling? No stomping?

His daughter always manages to surprise him, doesn't she? She just smirks and looks over at Juliet. "Oh, come on, Jules, you were kinda barfing a lot for awhile there. I'm not stupid."

Juliet manages to look both shocked and hopeful. "Of course we don't think you're stupid, Clementine. We were just trying to keep it private until we knew things were gonna be OK."

"How many months are you?"

"Three and a half."

"Do you know if it's gonna be a boy or girl yet?"

Juliet shakes her head. "In about six more weeks."

"OK. I just hope it's a boy, is all. Tabby is always stealing all my crap, and last week, Lulu? She actually _ate my lipgloss._ It was completely disgusting." Clem nods over at Jonah. "Little brother, not so bad. I can live with another one of these. I mean, it's not, like, the most awesome thing that's ever gonna happen to me or anything, but..." She shrugs. "So what about rooms and stuff? 'Cause you know I'm not sharing."

"'Course you ain't. But we ain't sure yet," James says. "We're tryin' to figure out whether to move or add on. If we move, it'll still be close by. We won't be any further away from your mom."

"Can I have my own bathroom?"

"Ohhh, sure, an' while we're at it, you can have your own hot tub, balcony an' a private entrance, too."

"Oh, wow, Dad's reacting with sarcasm. He's never tried that before."

James can't help it, he starts to laugh, even though he's starting to notice that Jonah is pretty much frozen next to him.

"That's it?" Juliet finally says.

"Well, I was pretty mad, like, a month ago. And then I was kind of ticked you guys weren't saying anything about it when I was pretty sure, but I talked to my mom and she said what you just did, that people like to wait awhile and make sure everything's OK."

James can't believe what he's hearing. That Clem had the presence of mind to talk about it to her mother, who actually (thank God) had given her a reasonable answer. He's sort of amazed he hadn't gotten a pissy phone call from Cass, but then again, she had two other kids herself. It wouldn't exactly be fair of her to pitch a fit.

But when the heck did his little girl get so sensible and self-assured and grown-up? He realizes he's just sort of staring at Clem, and Juliet has this little smile on her face. "That was really mature of you, Clementine," Juliet says, and the girl flushes pink with pride. "I'm really sorry you suspected something and we didn't tell you. You know you can always come to us if you have questions, right?"

Something about this doesn't seem right. What is it that's coming up in the back of his mind...? Clementine leans over Jonah and jabs James in the arm. "Well, I sorta asked _Dad_ about it ages ago and he totally dodged the question."

Juliet gives him a death glare. Wow, it's been awhile since he's seen one of those, at least a day or two. But the boy hasn't said a word yet. In fact, he's definitely starting to look sort of pissed-off. "Little J?"

"You're..." he begins, scrunching up his face like he does when he's thinking hard. "A baby? What do you need a baby for?"

That's actually kind of a hard question to answer._ Because your mom had you all alone on a remote Danger Island and wants to experience normal life? Because I think it'd be cool to actually be around for the beginning of one of my kids' lives for a change? Because we're already short on space and money, and we enjoy a challenge?_

Before either of them can say anything, he's back with more questions. "Will it be here before Christmas?" The boy looks a little anxious, like maybe he'll have to share his presents or something.

"Not until the beginning of summer," Juliet tells him. "Around the time you're almost done with school."

"Like, there's one in your tummy? Like Caleb's mom has?"

Juliet nods, pressing her fingertips against her lips to hide her smile.

Jonah thinks about this for a moment. "Gross," he finally says, wrinkling his nose. "How'd it get in there?"

_Ohhh, shit. Shit shit shit._ They really should have anticipated that question.

Clementine sucks in her breath and then starts practically snorting with laughter. "Can I please be excused?" she manages between embarrassed giggles. She might be growing more mature, but there's no way in hell any 13-year-old is gonna want to sit in on the baby-making explanation with her embarrassing dad, pregnant stepmom and little brother.

"Yep, get outta here," James says in a fake gruff voice. "Love you, ladybug."

"Yeah, yeah. Have fun, you guys." Clementine thunders up the stairs, still giggling.

* * *

"Well, that was... educational." James drops onto his side of the bed.

Juliet looks up from her notebook and smirks. "That's the spirit." She looks back down at the page without saying anything else, so James reaches for his book. Juliet's writing something furiously.

She's been on the phone with Brian a lot in the past week; she's been making some decisions about the future, but James is starting to get the feeling that she's thinking about more than she's letting on. He keeps hearing her mentioning names he doesn't recognize, George and David and who knows who else. Things have been so much more open between them since that big explosion they'd back in February, but this is still Juliet, after all. Only thing is, now he can trust that she'll tell him when she's ready.

A few minutes go by. "Do you think he's OK?" she says suddenly.

"Kid hadda hear about that sooner or later."

She laughs softly. "Not that. Not him - I mean, him, but... What if Jacob lied to me?"

They've been over this before. James doesn't know what to tell her. He doesn't know, because if it was up to him, he probably wouldn't have trusted Jacob. But he can't exactly tell Juliet that, because there's nothing they can do about that now. And James trusts her decision. Or, he wants to trust her decision.

"I don't know, baby," he finally says, and Juliet leans against him, tucks her head under his chin, and he shuts his eyes and buries his face into her hair. He should be completely happy tonight but now his lungs feel too tight and he almost wants to cry.

He thinks about Jonah's mud-stained red Chuck Taylors downstairs on the mat by the front door. Tries to imagine his son a grown man with a gun in the jungle, and he can't do it. He just can't.

She shifts against him. "Let's go to sleep," she says softly.

* * *

Saturday again. She's crammed up under the Outback, still a little annoyed - OK, supremely annoyed - by the disagreement they'd had over whether or not she should be still under a car in the first place. "For god sake's, James, I know what I'm doing." He'd started grumbling about how she wanted to spend who-knows-how-much adding onto the house but won't shell out thirty bucks to get an oil change done at the damn JiffyLube.

She'd finally gotten him to quit his harping by promising it would be the last time until after the baby's born, but seriously, she'll be under there for all of five minutes, will ditch the garage while the oil drains, and she can just barely fit under there without blocks so it's not like the car is going to fall on her or something. He'd stomped off in alpha-male mode._ Fine._

Juliet's barely starting to get the cap unscrewed when she hears the whine of a car engine outside.

Well, great, he can just deal with whomever's outside, she's already greasy and busy and kind of cranky and maybe she'll just stay under here all damn day if she feels like it. OK, she doesn't feel like it, but still.

She pauses in her tinkering, her fingers wrapped around the oil filter wrench, listening to see if he's getting the door. What she thinks she hears is upbeat enough. Maybe Clementine dropped in? James loves when she comes by on Cassidy's time. But Juliet remembers Clem's at her stepfather's this weekend, a half-hour drive away.

Now it's sounding like happy yelling. Happy yelling? Miles is due to arrive for a visit tomorrow, but maybe they'd gotten the days wrong? And he didn't call them from the airport? She frowns in the relative darkness. James sounds really... She doesn't know. She tenses her knees to slide out from under the car when the door from the kitchen opens, and footsteps approach.

Juliet freezes, her heart in her throat. The footsteps are like James', but they aren't. She draws in a shaky breath, which echoes on the closed-in space under the Outback.

Squeezing her eyes tight for just a moment, she hopes for the voice she really has no business hoping to hear, and prays to the universe that she won't be devastated when she doesn't get what she wants.

Except, this time, she does get what she wants.

"You need some help? Because my mom used to be a mechanic, and she taught me everything she knows."

She practically hits her head on the underside of the car.


	91. Here and There

_"Everything we had thought of as The World was actually the result of someone's job."_

- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

- FLASHFORWARD/FLASHBACK/HOWEVER THE HELL THAT WORKS (2030) -

"So what do you think is up with Faraday and that Dr. Carlson woman?"

"Uh... What?" Joe had been utterly focused in his work, but he looks warily across the cramped office he's been sharing with Aidan, another first-year PhD student, for all of two weeks.

Aidan holds an end of his pencil in each hand, stretching out against the edge of his uncomfortable desk chair. "She doesn't have an office here. I checked. But she's, like, _always here_. Is she even staff?"

Joe's getting the feeling that this is going to be incredibly awkward if he doesn't nip it in the bud, but he can't even find the words. "She's a fertility specialist," he finally manages.

Aidan's eyes light up. "So... like, what are you saying, that Faraday's having a lunch-hour thing with her? Seriously man, just wait. 'Cause I so called it." He ignores Joe's huff of protest. "But seriously, she's still hot, I mean, how the fuck is Faraday getting - "

"Whoa whoa whoa whoa. You should really keep your mouth closed sometimes, man. That's my mom you're perving about."

"Your... your... what? Really?" Aidan sputters. "Whoa. So, like, how old is she? 'Cause... damn."

"Ugh! She's. My. Mom! You know that part I _just_ told you about keeping your mouth closed? _Christ."_

"OK, OK, sorry, but what's the deal with them? Faraday's totally married."

"So are my parents, she just uses her maiden name, and no one's having an lunch-hour affair, dipshit. My mom owns a small scientific research company, and she's working on a grant program for physicists."

Aidan presses the pencil eraser onto his fingertip and narrows his eyes. "And why is she developing a grant program for physicists if she's a fertility specialist?"

Well, shit. Sometimes he forgets that even if Aidan acts like an idiot sometimes (a lot of the time), he's still a PhD candidate in quantum physics. Joe should probably stop underestimating him. "That's... sort of a long story. She and Faraday - AND his wife, AND my dad, _thank_ you, asshole - have been friends for years. And my mom is sort of interested in physics, well, she has an associate's degree in it, anyway, and... um... So she's just sort of supporting some research that Faraday and I are going to be working on together in, um, the future. It's part of, um - it's part of something he's going to be advising me on when it comes time for my dissertation, and she likes to support other sciences, and you know, the Faradays are friends, and..." Joe shrugs.

His mouth feels too dry, and he's sure he seems like a total tool now, that there's money changing hands and huge amounts of blatant nepotism are swirling about when really all they're trying to do is ensure that a war that's already been won _stays_ won. Not that his mother will even tell him a whole hell of a lot about it yet. But he still knows enough to know eventually he'll be going back to the island as part of Team Time Loop. Ugh.

Aidan's just shaking his head, though, looking sort of awed and maybe a little bit jealous. "Your mom must be loaded. And sorry, asshole, but she's still hot."

- END FLASHFORWARD/FLASHBACK/WHATEVER IT IS -

**

* * *

Saturday, December 20, 2014**

Joe parks his rental car outside the light gray house at the top of the hill. Turns off the ignition, presses the jagged edges of the keys against his palm. He'd thrown his mother's key into the ocean. Just like she'd wanted. (Everything was done. Just like she'd wanted.)

Except his mother still has an awful lot of work to do on her end. It's like they're holding two sides of a blanket, each of them clutching their own end tightly. But the middle sags and bows, the surface indecisive.

He sighs heavily into the car, and any effect the heater had has already dispersed. His breath puffs away, fogs up the windshield. Like smoke but not at all like smoke. Casting his eyes forward again, he sees just the finest haze of frost over the lawn (he's trying to calm his thudding heart, he's breathing too heavy). He's been back here one other time as an adult, back to the house they'd moved from when Eva was eight and he was fifteen (and where had he heard those numbers before? ...As if he didn't know).

That other time he's been in town for a bit of old-school breaking and entering. One of the few crimes he's managed to commit in his lifetime. Compared to his parents, _very_ few. But this time he's here on the up-and-up; that should make it all easier, but it's just...

Joe thinks back to seeing his mother on the beach with Alpert for the first time. The way he'd stood in that blinding sun, the unrelenting heat of another so-called winter on the island. He'd watched her from a distance, waiting for the right time.

Finally he'd decided there simply was no right time.

It had been more than a year and a half ago for her, just a few weeks ago for him. He'd been anxious, wanting her to approve of him, a version so different than her quiet little boy. And now he's guessing he's about to see his father as well. Go through that First Meeting That's Not a First Meeting at All.

He already knows he goes in, so what is he hesitating over? (He just wants his father here in 2014 to like him. Of all the stupid things.)

_There's no right time_, he reminds himself, and before he realizes it his hand is on the door and he's up and out of the car.

* * *

James is down on the floor building Lego cars with Jonah in his room when a car pulls up to the house. Great, the kid's gonna whine about interrupting their mechanical endeavors, but Juliet's all cranky in the garage and there's no way she's coming out from under that car 'til she's damn well good and ready. "Gimme a minute, Obi-Wan," he tells Jonah, getting to his feet.

The kid sticks out his lower lip and reaches for another set of wheels. "Hurry up, Dad. Or I'm gonna use up all the good pieces."

He claps his hand onto Jonah's shoulder. "Can't let that happen, huh?"

"Uh-uh."

He trots downstairs, takes a peek out the front window to spot an unfamiliar car at the driveway, swings open the door. There's a tall blond guy standing there, about James' height but younger than him, tilting his hand and standing slightly stooped with fatigue.

"Hey," James says slowly, curiously. The guy looks familiar. Too familiar.

And he smirks a little, and there's a dimple on the right side of his face where his lip curls up. Something in James' chest wobbles a little. "Uh..." the guy says awkwardly, and he raises his face, looking James straight in the eyes, and those are Juliet's eyes looking back at him. Those are _Jonah's _eyes looking back at him.

"Sonuvabitch!" James blurts, and his grown son starts to laugh at him, just standing there.

"You know, Ma will be pretty unhappy at what you're insinuating," he says, and Jesus Christ, it's his little-boy voice all grown up, just like the rest of him, and James is shaking his head and his heart's beating uncontrollably.

"Holy shit, what the - what the hell are you even - are you - " James can't even get the words out. "Get in here! Where are - when are you coming from?" He opens the door wider, backs up.

Jonah steps in, looks around the living room, shaking his head, amazed, and Jesus Christ, this is his _past_, this was his _childhood_, it must look like something out of a photo album to him. The kid - the guy, the man, his son - twists around. "I just came from the island."

James feels like he can't breathe, but in a good way. Like they're all saved, like everything is going to actually be OK at one point or another, or it already is, or something. Who even knows how that all works anyway, but right now, he doesn't really care how any of it works, because all that matters is that his kid is going to be OK.

* * *

Joe's father reaches out and grabs both of his shoulders tight, squeezing them like he's trying to decide whether to hug him for showing up here after all this time, or slug him for showing up... after_ all this fucking time. _"Thank fucking Christ!" he finally yells.

Joe is still laughing, but he's hugging his father back, and then they're both laughing and sort of crying in that embarrassed Men Don't Really Cry way, and yelling non-fucking-sensical stuff about how good it is to see each other, and eventually he asks Dad where he can find his mother, who of course is still totally clueless and, as it turns out, under a car right now.

He goes by himself to the garage, of course he remembers the way, but his heart is racing nonetheless (and this is a seriously insane life they're all living). He opens the door from the kitchen to the garage, sees his mother's legs sticking out from under the Outback. Oh yeah, the Outback, he remembers that car. Eva had thrown up all - and really,_ alllll_ - over the backseat in that car. Wow, that was an awful day. And then his mom had actually decided to reupholster the damn thing herself, and she was in an awful mood for probably a week. Then Clementine drove that car for a year or two in high school after his mom got the Volvo. Huh. This is some major Trip Down Memory Lane shit.

Joe sort of scuffles his shoes a little, making noise without saying anything because he's not sure yet what to say. He sees her knees tense like she's about to roll herself out from under the car. And really, what _is_ he supposed to say? "You need some help?" His voice comes out wobbly. "Because my mom used to be a mechanic, and she taught me everything she knows."

Her legs twitch and he hears her gasp under the car, and almost before he can blink, she's rolling out from underneath it and grabs the front bumper, sits up. Her eyes focus on his face and they get wider and wider, her mouth falling open. She throws her hands up in front of her face and for a moment Joe can't decide if he's hearing her choke out a sob or a laugh. Then she takes her hands away, and her face is flushed and radiant and he realizes she's doing both.

Also, there's now a huge grease mark all along the side of her nose. But as he reaches out to help her up, he can't keep his smile hidden.

"Oh my god," she's saying, over and over. "Oh my god. Oh my god." She steps closer, like she wants to hug him but can't remember how. Her face is wide open with disbelief and hope; she pulls off her gloves, touches his face like she can't believe what she's seeing. "Did you - did you just come from the island?"

He reaches up to catch her hand and he hugs her, hears his father's footsteps in the door. "Yeah," he says, but he can tell that somehow she already knew that, that the version of him standing in front of her was the version that had already been through all of that on-island business with her.

"Carolyn - " she pulls away to see his face. "Is Carolyn - "

"She's OK," he promises her. "She's already gone back. To our present. We're going to make it so I was only gone a couple of weeks."

She's shaking her head over and over in disbelief. "You - how did you - you turned the...?"

"The wheel. Yeah." He nods, turning so he can see both of his parents at once. His mother raises her face to his father, still wiping away tears, and Dad takes the two steps down into the basement, wraps an arm around her, and she sags into him. Joe notices the swell of what will eventually become Eva. And, God, this will probably never stop being weird. "We got back a couple of days ago, your time," Joe tells them. "I was aiming for the day after Thanksgiving, but I overshot it a little."

His mother rolls her eyes, grinning. "Don't tell me they lost your luggage, too."

* * *

Juliet decides this is probably the best day of her life, and all they're doing right now is sitting in the kitchen with two beers and one cup of tea, with the little Jonah periodically coming by to beg his grownup self to play with him.

"Later, buddy," Joe promises him, and James looks like his brain's about to explode any minute.

Juliet slips her hand under the table, laces her fingers with her husband's. _See how amazing he is? _she tries to tell James with her eyes, and whether James gets it or not, he gives her hand a squeeze.

"So you're thinking of suing Liemstal, huh?" Joe says by way of beginning, and her stomach lurches.

"...What?" James asks.

Juliet turns to him slowly. "I've been talking to Brian about it. Most of - I knew most of the people listed in Liemstal's documents. Everyone's dead now. It just... It just kind of comes down to who was time-traveling when, before they died." Some of those people, well, she'd been the one who'd killed them. "A lot of their financial processes are running electronically. Someone will turn up out of the woodwork every few months or so. Brian... Brian thinks I can bring a civil suit against them and win against them in absentia. Even if they know about it, it would probably be better for them to not show up, or they'd face major criminal charges."

James takes a swig of beer. "OK."

She almost wants to laugh. "Just... _'OK'?_ That's it?"

James shrugs. "Depends on what Mini-You over there has to say."

Jonah smirks. "You'll win."

Juliet can't help the way she leans back in surprise. She blinks. "I will?"

"Yep. And the you in the future has a bunch of information she'd like you to have." Joe starts rifling through his bag, and she tries to even vaguely fathom what it was he'd just told her. He pulls out a few thick folders. "Here."

She takes the documents from him, noticing her own first name written on the top of the stack. In her own damn handwriting. _Of course. _She slides them over to James, who brushes his hand over her name, shaking his head.

"There's, um..." Joe clears his throat. "There's gonna be a bunch of stuff you have to do. Or, you know. To my perspective, you already did. But there's information in there you'll need for yourself, and then things you're going to need to tell that kid" - he points his finger to the ceiling, angled off to the end of the house where his bedroom is (was?) - "before he goes."

She nods. She knows. She'd gotten more than an inkling of that on the island. That suture kit... She'd given it to him. Or, she will. However that works. She tries to imagine herself, some quasi-all-knowing Coordinator of Island Activities, sending her own past self information. Can't quite manage it.

"Course correction should be in play," he's saying. "Little things might change. Some things, I think you'll want to try to change. The fundamentals should stick. Like how I couldn't make it to the well because I'd hit my head? You'd told me I would sprain my ankle. I'm guessing if you tell the younger me that he'll hit his head, instead he'll sprain his ankle."

A wave of exhaustion washes over her suddenly, and she closes her eyes. What was it she'd said to him, that night she'd gotten her scar? _It's too much,_ she'd said._ I can't do this._

But he'd told her she could, she already had. And she believes him now. She opens her eyes, looks at her son sitting there, that smirk on his face like he utterly and completely knows what she's thinking. And she slides her eyes over to James, who looks less certain, and she bumps her knee against his. He angles his head to see her face.

_Tell me this will all be OK, _he says without speaking.

_It will be, _she replies.

* * *

Miles arrives for his planned visit. Can't stop giving them shit about the situation, telling them when their boy needs therapy they're going to start seeing that this time-traveling business wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

Except... except the Miles who comes to see them isn't quite the Miles they'd remembered.

"Thank you, Jules," Miles whispers to her before he leaves. He reaches out a hand to her before he thinks better of it, and drops it against his side again.

She can only smile. "I haven't done anything yet."

* * *

Joe leaves after a week. Two days after Christmas. He remembers that Christmas, how excited he was as a kid to have Joe visiting them for the holiday. And it was great in an utterly weird way to watch him and Clem with their presents, and his parents young-ish and kind of sappy (although they're still kind of sappy, now that he thinks about it).

But he misses Caro, and anyway, he's got a whole life to get back to in 2042. He's already decided not to tell his mother anything else about Caro, that things are working out all right between them. She already knows more than enough. He thinks he sort of knows anyway. That wiseass smirk of hers (of theirs).

His parents drive him to the airport. He has to go out to Oxford to get back to his present. They'd stayed up late the night before, just him and his mother in the glow of the tree. "Am I ever going to see you again?" she'd murmured.

"Didn't you ever see 'Back to the Future'? Because I think this is the part where I say, 'I guarantee it'."

His mother had rolled her eyes at him, resting her hand on what he keeps thinking of as Eva already. "Other than then."

"If you want to."

"What do you mean?"

"Meet me at Oxford in two years, the Saturday after Thanksgiving. I figure you're going to have your hands busy for awhile with that one." He gestured toward proto-Eva.

She'd closed her eyes for a long moment. "It's really going to happen, isn't it?"

"The kid?"

She'd nodded.

"Did you really think it wasn't?"

His mother blinked a couple of times, and he thought he saw a tear in her eye. "There are no guarantees in life. And you'd never mentioned..." Her face twisted uncertainly.

He was flooded with guilt. "I'm sorry. I guess there was a part of me that was still trying to play by the rules."

"Well, I'd say we'd stopped playing by those a long time ago. It's really going to be OK?"

"Yeah. Really. You want to know what it's gonna be?"

His mother had laughed softly. "Too weird. I think I'll wait for the doctor, with your father."

"OK. That kid is gonna be a hellion, though, I'll tell you that."

"Oh, darn, because nothing was _ever_ complicated with you."

Now he shifts in the car, looks at his parents up in the front seat, his little self buckled into the booster seat. There's snow glittering all along the side of the highway, and his father's driving because his father hates his mother's driving.

His mother twists around, wearing a gray wool hat even with the heater going full-blast (she'll never quite get used to the winters, this he knows for sure). She moves his eyes all over her face, and he remembers her, wild on the island, the sound of those gunshots coming from the central chamber in that creepy foot statue thing. The way she was about to step into that wall of smoke surrounding the village. And how fast she could load a rifle. How she could skin a boar, meticulously, piece by piece. How she'd never flinched when he was stitching her up on that tent, that awful night.

And then he remembers her yelling at Eva for staying out all night. Laughing hysterically when his father gave her an old Geronimo Jackson record one year on her birthday. Beaming at all their graduations, and between the three of them, they'd had a hell of a lot of them. And the day his father's first book came out, when she actually made him sign her copy, while his father pretended to act embarrassed when he definitely wasn't. And the way she'd smiled, holding Clem's babies in the hallways of the hospital. And cursing under her breath, assembling Lucy's tricycle.

And somehow it manages to all stack up in some ways, and then not in others.

But that's probably the way it's always going to be.

* * *

**Next chapter is the final one! Please leave a review!**


	92. Halfway, Always, for the Last Time

**Well, this is it... If you'd like to get a PDF of this story, e-mail me at tia(dot)someone815(at)gmail(dot)com and tell me what name/alias you've used to comment on this site. Thanks, everyone, for your continued interest and support. **

* * *

_"I looked out the window for other passengers in love with their drivers, but we were well-disguised. We pretended boredom and prayed for traffic."_

- Miranda July, "No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories"

* * *

**January 8, 2015**

Juliet's up in the last row of the bleachers at Swandale, her back aching pressed against the yellow cinderblock wall. She's far too early to pick up Clementine, so in theory she's here to watch practice. In theory.

Instead she's reading through some of the notes Joe had brought her. Insider trading, really. Wasn't that what Alice had called this sort of thing?

The helicopter moms in the front row yelp at some minor injustice on the court. For God's sake, it's just practice. Down near the beginning of the bleachers, Clementine catches her glance and offers an eye-roll. Juliet grins back, shaking her head.

Next thing she knows, a white paper cup of coffee is plunked down next to her. "You know, if you ain't screamin' at someone, Clem's gonna think you don't care. At least try to pretend you're in this for blood."

Juliet gives the cup a pointedly needy gaze. "What is that?"

"Half-caf French roast," James says, sipping his own. He drops onto the bench next to her.

"Have I mentioned lately that you're the best fake husband I've ever had?"

"Not recently, no, so I'll just soak up all your praise and pretend it don't have nothin' to do with that." James taps the bottom of her cup as she takes a sip.

The coffee rolls over her tongue and she pauses. "Is there milk in this?"

"He said you like it that way, in the future." James salutes Clem down on the court. Clem sticks her tongue out and lunges for the ball, running after Taylor.

"I have news for you, James. It's not the future yet."

"It's more the future now than it was last week."

"Shut up and watch the practice and let me get my reading done." But she smiles at him anyway, takes another sip, decides it's not so bad like this. But does she start drinking it like this because she likes it, or does she drink it because she's told she likes it? Just another one of those things that's never really going to sort itself out.

These seating arrangements are leaving something to be desired. Juliet tries to stretch out her back, then flips onto the next page. She squints at the heading on top of the page. "Wh... Oh my God," she murmurs.

James looks over. "Hmm?"

She watches him for a long moment, weighing her options of letting him in or keeping this secret. For once it's not a difficult decision. "James. Look."

He slides closer to her, sits with his knee touching hers. He leans down; his eyes widen. "Holy shit."

"Holy shit, indeed." Juliet's not sure whether she wants to cry or laugh. Maybe a little of both. "She'll... be OK, right?" Like James would know.

He rubs at his forehead for a long moment. "We ain't raising no dummies."

Juliet huffs in disapproval. "It just seems so... unnecessary."

"Hey now, I think it shows a fine appreciation for tradition."

Juliet keeps reading, scans the rest of the page, then the next, then the next. Her racing heart calms down some. She lets out a deep breath. The baby taps at her from the inside. "Fine, have it your way," she finally says, and she's not even sure who she's talking to.

"It ain't my _way_, I'm just sayin'. She ain't even born yet. Cut her some slack." He reaches out and pulls her closer to him. "Ya know, this is a pretty weird life we got here."

She leans over to kiss him. "I think I like it that way."

* * *

- EPILOGUE (2042) -

Alice Widmore died of cancer in London one hundred years ago this month. She is buried in Queens Road Cemetery. She willed the bulk of her estate to a privately funded organization, the name of which has never been released. She also left behind a sizable trust for her son Charles, and specified that the key to a locked filing cabinet be given to him when he turned 16.

Dr. Juliet Carlson filed a class-action lawsuit against Liemstal Enterprises, LLC, in 2016. The case settled out of court for an unspecified sum. Shortly thereafter, she donated sizable amounts of money to both the American Cancer Society and the Hanso Foundation. In 2023, she received a prestigious one-year fellowship at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in Birmingham, Alabama, which was later extended to two years, a rare honor. She owns a small, private scientific research company, Steamlit Biosciences. Now semi-retired, Juliet volunteers two days a week at a shelter for homeless women and children. She lives in Boston with her husband, a writer.

James Ford's latest novel, Stay in the Bus, Hero, spent 16 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. His work is well-known for its twisted wit, and the way he seamlessly combines elements of science fiction with both mundane realism and humanity's darker side. He lives in Boston with his wife, a doctor. Although he says he hates flying, they usually manage to visit friends in South Korea at least once a year.

Brian and Rachel O'Connell moved to in Boston in 2018. Brian, a lawyer, does some pro-bono work for victims of identity theft and human trafficking. Rachel manages their retirement investments and works part-time as a secretary for a box company.

Dr. Julian O'Connell is an oncologist in Miami.

John Locke disappeared mysteriously from Tustin, California during the summer of 2013. He has never been located, and is presumed dead.

Miles Chang hosts a popular segment on a Discovery Channel show about the supernatural. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Brenna. They have three grown children.

Dr. Pierre Chang mysteriously returned to Los Angeles in late 1992 following a three-decade absence. He was able to reconnect with his then-teenaged son. He died in 2017 at the age of 80.

Jin Kwon lives in Seoul, South Korea, near his three daughters, Sang-hi, Kyung-hwa and Ji-Yeon. He is a proud grandfather to ten. His beloved wife, Sun Kwon, died last year after a brief illness.

Hugo Reyes turned Mr. Cluck's Chicken from a successful enterprise into a multi-billion-dollar one. Much of this success is attributed to his development of healthy menu items and his astonishing weight loss as a result. He stars in all the company's commercials. A recurring gimmick involves him holding up an old pair of pants in a large size, then stepping aside to flaunt his weight-loss results, which he attributes to eating Mr. Cluck's grilled menu items.

Alexandra Rousseau and Karl Martin are active members of Seattle's underground art scene. Alex paints and sculpts; many of her works feature small, numbered animals. Karl specializes in multimedia and video creations. His latest installment is entitled Room 23.

Dr. Daniel Faraday is head of the physics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also maintains an office at the University of Oxford, although this office tends to be unmanned. This office generates an odd rumor now and then about people seemingly appearing out of nowhere.

Dr. Charlotte Lewis spent many years splitting her time between her family and her work in Tunisia. Now retired, she enjoys teaching her grand-daughter several languages, including French, Latin and Korean.

Dr. Samuel Faraday, a hydrologist, focuses his research on a seemingly inexplicable change in ocean currents that begin abruptly in late 2014.

Clementine Michalczik is a prosecutor for the city of New York. She's known for a tough-as-nails exterior and her ability to deliver a rapid-fire series of questions that frequently leaves defense witnesses stunned, while always knowing the appropriate time to back off. She is married to a journalist, and has two stepdaughters and two daughters.

Dr. Jonah Ford recently returned to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after a brief sabbatical in an undisclosed location. He is newly engaged to Carolyn Hume. In his free time, he serves as as volunteer coordinator for the largest vegan organization on the East Coast.

Dr. Eva Ford recently completed a PhD in zoology, having written her dissertation on ursine behavior and learning abilities. She is now employed with the Dharma Initiative. In her free time, she plays bass guitar in the rock band Geronimo Jackson. (She is currently living in 1972.)

* * *

- FLASHBACK (2015) -

"Mama?"

Juliet looks up from her work. "Can't sleep, buddy?"

Jonah frowns. "Uh-uh. I had a bad dream. Can I stay up with you?"

She should tell him she'll take him back upstairs, read to him while he falls asleep. But she notices an unfamiliar book clutched in his hand. "What do you have there?"

He holds it out to her: It's a Very Small World: A Book About Atoms.

For a moment (just a moment, really) she's seized by panic. She closes her eyes for a second, wills herself to open them again. "Where did you get that?"

Jonah shrugs. "Joe gave it to me." He climbs onto the chair next to her. "Except how come if atoms are the smallest small thing, there's smaller stuff inside them? How can people know that if they can't even see it?"

How is she even supposed to do this? "Those... those are good questions, buddy. And you know what's even weirder?"

"What?"

"No one really knows what's going on for sure, because those pieces are so tiny that just the mere fact of people looking at them... Well, it means they might change things."

Jonah frowns, thinking. "That's..."

"It's complicated."

"Yeah," he finally says. "It sounds very, very, _very_ complicated."

And so they begin.


End file.
